


At Ease, Soldier

by Castiel_For_King



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel Wings, Castiel is not human and it shows, Dean Winchester uses his words, Hannah is part of the fam jam, M/M, Sam is just happy its over, Sex on the Beach, Soldier!Cas, Team Free Will, They all go on a little vacation, Wing Kink, angel habits, not the drink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:29:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22397113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castiel_For_King/pseuds/Castiel_For_King
Summary: "The feathers all down the sides of Cas' wings lifted then, as well as the little ones along the leading edge, and this time Dean did smile.  The fluffing feathers, coupled with the way Cas' lips parted and his eyes got a little wide suddenly brought it into focus and Dean realised what the rising feathers meant: Bashfulness.  Cas was fucking blushing with his wings and it was the most delightful thing Dean had ever seen."Dean takes Team Free Will to the beach in the rain.  Things finally get said.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 23
Kudos: 200





	At Ease, Soldier

It had been years since Dean had been in Maine. Last time had been for a hunt too; of course, why else would they go somewhere but for a hunt? For _fun_? 

The idea wasn't as laughable as it once had been, not now that Team Free Will had expanded as it had; not now that Dean was pushing forty and his brother wasn't far behind. His muscles seemed perpetually sore the last few years and his four hours a night was now next to impossible. It was seven to eight hours a night or he was an absolute liability. So yeah, sometimes Dean might think about going somewhere just for the sake of going there. To relax. For _fun_.

He wondered, as he often did, where they might choose to go…if they were to go at all, and his eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror, took in Cas' profile as the angel gazed out the window, nose nearly touching the glass. The grey sky, occluded now with thick clouds that promised rain, were mirrored in his dark blue eyes, like a gathering storm reflecting off the ocean's surface.

The impala roared down the poorly funded East coast highway, tires skipping over wide cracks and missing chunks of asphalt in a way that made Dean wonder if Baby’s shocks needed to be replaced.

Across the back seat from Cas, was Hannah, gazing out her own window, her eyes on the darkening sky much like Cas' were, but with a little smile tilting her lips and her head resting back against the seat. 

Hannah had sort of become a part of their little family over the last few months. Several times, late at night when Dean and Sam had gone to bed, Dean had gotten up to use the bathroom or stumble to the fridge for a 2AM snack and had, on more than one occasion, overheard Cas and Hannah talking about heaven. Among other things.

They talked about how much they missed what it had been, how they both knew it would never be that way again. He'd listened to them lament the loss of their home as if it were already gone – and perhaps it was, Dean had never bothered to ask. It had never occurred to him before. Now that it had, he was almost afraid to ask. He didn't want to cause either of them added grief by asking them to talk about it. 

He'd heard Hannah confess her envy of Castiel. She'd told him that few 'escaped' heaven like he had. She told him she wanted to escape too. Dean had listened while she cried into Castiel's shoulder and had to shove his fist in his mouth when Castiel started whispering urgent, soothing words to her in Enochian, trying to calm her and reassure her even though his voice was shaking. 

It was one thing to rebel on your own, it was another thing entirely for someone to ask you to guide them through it. Castiel remembered what it had been like for him, how he'd had to tear himself free of the Host and leave behind bloody, shredded pieces of himself in it's claws. He was probably thinking of the pain he'd went through and that Hannah must now go through as well.

The next day Dean had told Sam everything he'd overheard and extended an offer for Hannah to stay with them. Permanently, if she wanted. He'd kept it light, slapped Cas on the shoulder and said something about already fostering one angel, what was one more?

Hannah had blinked at him with shock that lasted several long seconds and Castiel turned away, rubbed the pads of his fingers over his lips in a way Dean had only seen once or twice before when the angel had been particularly overwhelmed by something.

But then Hannah had startled out of her revere and quickly wiped at her cheek with the back of her hand and nodded with a watery smile, beyond words. The two angels had turned to each other then, with smiles wider than Dean had seen on either of them, and had briefly leaned in to touch their foreheads. It had been the closest thing to a hug he'd ever seen an angel do, but it had looked and felt more intimate than that. Maybe it was an angel thing; something more than a hug and less than a kiss.

Back in the impala, the memory still made something unpleasant curl in Dean's guts and he glanced in the rear-view mirror again.

Cas and Hannah were literally as far apart as they could be in the back seat, each of them pressed up against the doors, faces nearly touching the windows. Though Dean knew the distance between them meant nothing, remembered how close the two of them could get. More than once he'd walked in on them in the same bed, or in a huge, fluffy nest of blankets and pillows in front of the fire in the sitting room. Tangled up in each other, sound asleep.

Over the last few months Dean had learned a lot about angels. He'd seen Cas do things – indulge instincts and customs and habits – that he never had before. 

Cas felt comfortable around Hannah. He could be himself around Hannah and, by extension, seemed to feel more at ease being himself around Sam and Dean too. 

Dean could understand that easily enough. Humans were as strange to angels as angels were to humans and Cas had always been a little cautious around them anyway. Never really talked about himself or his kind unless it was necessary and Dean had always gotten the impression that he was almost shy about himself. Or else he was worried he might freak the brothers out if he let himself go too much.

It was something Dean had been trying to break him of for the last couple years – unsuccessfully. But, as it turned out, all he'd needed was to find Cas another angel to get him to loosen up a little. He tried not to think too hard about what Hannah might be doing to loosen Cas up. He tried not to think about it at all, actually.

In the passenger seat, Sam started snoring, drawing Dean out of his thoughts. He glanced over and felt a smile tug at his lips when he saw that Sam had fallen asleep with a book open in his lap, which was now in danger of falling onto the dirty floor. 

How Sam could read in a moving car without puking had always made Dean wonder.

A deep sigh from the back seat made him look to the mirror again.

Cas had let his head fall back on the seat like Hannah's and was gazing higher into the sky, the side of his face actually pressed to the glass now. His gaze remained a fixed point in the clouds, as if he very much wished he were up in them.

Across the bench seat, Hannah's had much the same look in her grey eyes and her smile had disappeared. 

Dean focused on the road again, feeling the heavy atmosphere press down on him like the overcast sky overhead.

He liked Hannah. He really did. She was incredibly efficient when it came to paperwork, organization and research. She was kind and helpful and pulled her weight. She quite obviously cared for Castiel and Castiel quite obviously cared for her. She'd managed to pull Cas out of his shell; or maybe she'd just managed to sooth his nerves enough that he could relax. Either way, Cas seemed happier than he ever had without her around and for that alone, Dean liked her.

Even if it made something cold and dark claw at his chest.

Cas shifted in his seat, his shoulders rolling back and down as he continued to stare up at the sky. 

Dean rolled his bottom lip between his teeth, glancing past Sam's slack-jaw and fluttering eye lids to the foggy coast off to the east.

One of the things he'd learned since Hannah had moved in was that angels could manifest their wings. Apparently, it was no big deal; the only reason they kept them hidden was so that they didn't freak out the poor humans around them, but once the brothers had found out Dean had sat Cas down and told him in no uncertain terms that he should stop hiding from them just because he thought that _they_ thought it might be weird. After all the crazy shit they'd seen in their life, wings on an angel was pretty low on the list.

Dean pulled a slow breath through his nose and released it.

Cas' wings were so beautiful it was fucking ridiculous. Dark and strong and dishevelled just like the rest of him, but softer than cashmere the one time Dean had had reason to touch them.

Once the wings had come out, the little flying excursions had started and it was lucky the bunker was as secluded as it was. Cas and Hannah spent hours flying around the miles and miles of forest surrounding the bunker. Sometimes, when there was nothing more pressing than the need to fight over Netflix, the two of them would leave the bunker at dawn and wouldn't return until sunset, squeezing through the bunker door with their cheeks red and hair wild from the wind, breathing hard and giggling, their eyes alight with shining grace, practically oozing happiness.

After an entire day of flying, they would collapse into the nest of blankets and pillows that was now a permanent fixture in the sitting room and literally pass out, wings draped over each other like blankets, and sleep for hours.

It hadn't taken Dean long to realize that angels truly were creatures of flight and seeing how happy it made Cas just to indulge his instinct to fly till he dropped made Dean wonder how he'd coped all those years having to keep his wings tucked away all the time. The only time he didn't have his wings out now was if they had to go on a hunt or go to the grocery store.

Castiel was more at ease and more happy than Dean had thought he could be and while that made his own heart glow in a way he would never, ever vocalize, it still left him feeling disappointed that _he'd_ had nothing to do with it.

Well, he could make Cas happy _right_ _now_ by finding him and Hannah a place to stretch their wings for a bit. It had been days since they'd gotten to fly, and Dean knew they were getting pretty used to being able to do so every day.

Unwanted, the image of two great eagles trapped in tiny metal cages made something in Dean's chest twinge and he glanced up in the mirror again, grimacing when he saw that Cas' eyes were closed now, as if he didn't want to look at the sky at all if he couldn't be up in it.

Clearing his throat roughly, Dean reached across the seat and smacked his brother on the arm.

“Wake up, I'm hungry,” he said loud enough that Sam grunted and jerked awake.

Sam blinked around with a bleary, bemused expression, his fingers clutching at the book in his hands reflexively. A split second later, when he realized nothing was trying to kill them, he sunk back down against the seat and pulled a breath through his nose, eyes already looking droopy.

“ _What_?”

“I said, I'm _hungry_. Wanna find some food,” Dean reiterated, easing his foot off the gas pedal when it started raining lightly, so light the water hit the windshield more like mist than rain.

Sam's head fell against the window with a thunk, his eyes already closed. “We're in the middle of nowhere, Dean.”

While not technically true, they certainly weren't anywhere that was likely to have a diner open on a Sunday. They were just coming up on the outskirts of what looked like a fishing village right out of a Maine tourism booklet. There were small houses dotted along the edge of the shore line and pushing up into the rocky hills across from it. The fog and mist drifting in from the water hovered around the houses, making the paint look even more dull and weathered than it already was. The lights in the windows kept it from being creepy.

They passed a post office and a liquor store a few minutes later, and Dean kept his eyes peeled for some kind of general goods store or, if they were lucky, a grocery store. After a few more minutes of guiding the impala around the curves of the road following the shore line Dean spotted one. 

He pulled into the lot, eyeing the half burnt out sign that read 'SaveEasy'.

“If you can find a vegetable in there that isn't rotten, buy it,” Sam ordered sleepily from where he was curled against the door. “I don't even care what it is, if I have to eat one more hamburger I swear to -”

Dean slammed his door closed, smirking when he saw Cas through the window trying hard not to grin, and headed for the door to the little market with a spring in his step. He had the vague wisp of an idea forming in his head and if he could make it all come together then, hopefully, he could at least claim a bit of Castiel's happiness for himself.

Twenty minutes later he was walking back to the car with two bags in each hand, full of food and determination.

“Jesus, how much did you buy?” Sam asked after Dean had put the bags in the trunk and gotten back in the driver's seat.

“I have an idea,” he answered. He half turned on his seat, hooking his elbow over the back to look at Cas and Hannah. “You guys wanna fly, right?”

The angels shared a look, seemingly having an entire conversation without talking in the span of a millisecond, before they both looked back with identical looks of appeasement, their mouths opening at the same time.

“Of course you do,” Dean said with an easy grin. He knew they'd been about to give one of those _no it's fine, really we don't have to_ speeches. He looked over at Sam. “And you wanna sleep in a bed, right?”

Sam looked both more tired and more awake at the very thought of a bed. 

“Of course you do. _Plus_ , I've been thinking it might be cool to go somewhere just 'cause we damn well please and, since we're already here, why not go to the beach?”

Cas and Hannah both perked up, seemingly immediately on board with the idea, but Sam was frowning at him.

“It's raining.”

“Still sharp as a tac, Sam.”

“Why would we go to the beach when it's raining?” Sam asked, looking like he thought Dean had hit his head.

“Because it's the perfect cover for these two to have a little sky time because nobody will be there this time of year and in this weather. _And_ the lady in the store told me there is a super nice beach up the road a bit more with cabins you can rent for a night. So, we go to the beach, wings and wingette get to fly, I get to eat and you can do whatever the hell you want to do.”

Sam was squinting across the car at him, looking as if he were truly struggling to understand what Dean was saying.

“You...wanna go on vacation?”

“Yes!”

Sam blinked a few times, his gaze drifting back towards the trunk, likely trying to remember how many books he'd brought with him. But then his eyes fell on Cas and Hannah's identical looks of hopeful but carefully contained excitement and one corner of his mouth lifted in a smile.

“Actually, that sounds awesome.”

Dean turned back around and looked up in the mirror. Castiel's grin was wide enough to show his straight white teeth and Dean cursed when he fumbled the keys, dropping them on the floor before he could get them in the ignition.

* * *

Only a few miles up the road and far enough outside the town that Dean felt safe letting the angel's do whatever they wanted, was the beach the lady had promised.

It was still drizzling, the rain not so much falling as it was drifting down from the sky. But the fog had thickened, bringing visibility down to half a mile at best and, when Dean parked the car in the gravel lot off the road, he could only barely see the edge of the water. It was grey like everything around it, and calm as the still air and mist that hung above it, lapping at the sand with gentle, rippling waves.

The tide was out, far, far out, and the sand bar stretched between them and the water for a quarter of a mile. Flat and rippling in places where the water was trapped. A bit father down from the parking lot, just on the edge of the sand, he could see vague formations that must be the little cabins and he told them to follow as he led the way, each of them with a bag in their hand to share the load.

This time of year – late in the spring and not quite close enough to summer for people to think about trips to the beach – the cabins were free to public use. In a town this small, where everyone knew everyone, vandalism wasn't that big a concern and when they came up to the cabins they looked to be clean and in good shape.

They were still doorless shacks on a rainy beach, but they were nice, Dean thought, for what they were trying to accomplish.

The little huts were square, the wooden planks painted with peeling sky blue color that stood little chance against the salt-infused air. Dean trod up the sturdy steps of the first one he reached and glanced at the small deck, complete with a railing you could lean on and watch over the water. There was no door, just an open archway into the single room, but the walls were insulated and there was a floor between their feet and the sand. On either side of the shack there had been built simple wooden benches, well wide enough for a person to lay down on comfortably – bring your own linens, though.

“We still have all those blankets in the trunk?” Sam asked, eyeing the wooden benches while he set his bag on the floor by the doorway.

“Yep, I'll get 'em in a sec.”

Dean walked back out of the little hut and looked around for the two angels, finding them both hovering shoulder to shoulder in the doorway of the next hut over, taking turns peeking curiously inside and murmuring in low tones.

Hannah said something that made Castiel shoot her a sharp look and she laughed in turn, shoving at his shoulder while he continued to glare until her hands went up in surrender and his expression eased. 

Dean nearly fell over the side of the railing before he realized what he was doing and managed to right himself before anyone saw him trying to eavesdrop. 

“Uh,” he cleared his throat, glancing over his shoulder when he heard Sam stomping up behind him, “You guys hungry?” he called across the distance between him and the angels.

Cas and Hannah's head snapped around like they'd forgotten he was there and Dean told himself not to read too much into their expressions. 

Hannah opened her mouth, eyes dancing, but Castiel quickly said, “No, thank you.” and shoved her through the doorway, following her inside.

Behind him, Sam huffed a laugh. “What the hell was that about?”

 _Nothing I want to know about_ , Dean thought dejectedly. Out loud, he said, “Dunno man, angels are weird. Think we could get a fire started?”

“Uhh might be some drift wood lying around but it'd be soaked,” Sam said, glancing out over the smooth expanse of sand.

Dean couldn't spot anything burnable.

Luckily, they had two angels that could cover a lot of distance really quickly and enjoy every second of it. He was just about to yell for them to come out of the hut when Castiel came running back out through the door with a bark of laughter and Dean's words dried up in his throat.

Cas had taken off every item of clothing except his worn out jeans, his tanned skin still looking dark even with the rainy atmosphere around him and when he'd run a few meters from the hut he turned, eyes positively dancing and a wide smile splitting his face so bright Dean felt blinded and he clutched at the soggy wooden railing under his hands.

But Cas wasn't looking at him, he was looking back towards the hut where Hannah was emerging.

It wasn't the first time he'd seen either of them half naked. When one had wings, shirts tended to get in the way, so it felt like most of the time one or both of them was in some state of undress. Strangely enough, Hannah always had a flesh coloured band around her chest which Dean was both grateful for and puzzled by. He'd kind of just assumed, the first time he'd seen Cas strip his shirt off and let his wings go, that Hannah would do the same. After all, angels seemed to lack any sense of human social propriety and, to them, gender expectations weren't something they knew about or cared to know about.

He'd already told himself not to be weird about it because it didn't mean anything for her to go around without a top on and he didn't think he'd be all that bothered by it after the initial strangeness of it. But then that little strip of cloth, like a cream colored tube top, was always there. He wondered if it had something to do with the time she spent on earth. Angels weren't stupid, they just didn't care about petty human customs, but maybe she had picked up on this one.

Either way, the scowl on her face drew more attention than the skin that was showing and she strode out to meet Castiel.

“That's not funny, Castiel,” she nearly huffed.

Castiel threw her a shit-eating grin that, Dean noted with pride, he could only have learned from him. “Oh, I disagree.”

The air behind Hannah's back swam like heat waves and Castiel straightened imperceptibly, the air behind him doing the same.

“That was _one_ time,” continued Hannah.

“So prove me wrong, then.” 

Castiel levelled a challenging stare upon her, his chin tipping up, eyes glinting.

Dean wondered what the hell was going on, but then that was nothing new. He'd often observed the two angels in similar situations, picking up a conversation that had dropped off centuries ago like only minutes had passed. Referencing moments shared between them over the course of their vast existence that Dean would probably never know about. They exuded such an easy camaraderie, such a fluidity to the way they acted around one another and communicated with one another that spoke of a very, very long friendship and it tugged sickeningly at Dean. He'd never have that with Castiel.

He felt like a piece of garbage when he thought things like that, when he got jealous – because that's what it was – of what Hannah had with Cas; what he _wished_ he had with Cas.

If Cas was happy, Dean was happy...but he couldn't help the want he felt. Couldn't stop that little green monster from tearing at him whenever he saw Hannah so comfortably and casually interacting with and _touching_ Cas. Or especially when he saw Cas accept and reciprocate it all so easily.

This was a guy who, up until a few months ago, turned to marble whenever someone tried to hug him.

His attention was pulled away from his depressing thoughts when Castiel suddenly weaved between the grab of Hannah's hands. It seemed as if he had finally provoked her into attacking, and he backed quickly away, chuckling lowly. Then his wings were suddenly there, beating down forcefully like he'd had to break through the barrier keeping them hidden, and Dean sucked in a breath.

No matter how many times he saw them, Castiel's wings always took his breath away. 

They were black as night along the leading edges, the dark spilling halfway down the wings on either side like spilled ink. On the inside, the part that was hidden when they were folded, there were browns like dark chocolate that tapered off down the long flight feathers into something lighter, a color Dean could only describe as burnt gold. And much like Cas' constantly wild hair and the stubble on his face or the way he never seemed to get the hang of ironing, his wings were a little dishevelled, a little wild looking.

They were beautiful. _Cas_ was beautiful, Dean felt himself thinking as he curled his arm around one of the deck posts and leaned against it.

“If you're still hungry,” Sam said, coming to stand beside him and watching the angel's bicker, “We could always cook the little birds flying around your head. They probably taste just like chi -”

Dean turned and punched his brother in the arm, hard. Doing it again when Sam leaned away and cackled.

Hannah's wings were visible now too and they were so different from Cas' it was incredible.

Her wings were sleek and agile looking, and dove grey in color, not a feather out of place. They looked delicate and lethal at the same time, like a glass sword.

She had them folded tightly against her back advancing on Castiel, who was now backing away with his wings arched behind him and spread to half their length, a look on his face that suggested he was just waiting for her to leap at him.

They did that sometimes too, spar for fun. Play fighting. Whatever you wanted to call it. It was hard to tell, though, because apparently, even when they were just doing it for fun, angels didn't fuck around. Sam and Dean had come home from a hunt not long after Hannah had officially moved in – as much as an angel could move in to a concrete box under the ground – and had found them sparring in the weapons room.

The brothers had legitimately thought something had gone horribly wrong. Teeth bared in snarls and grace shinning through their eyes, the angels had circled each other like wounded lions, ferocity and fury evident in every line of their bodies. Cas had had a gleaming axe in each hand, Hannah a pointed spear in hers, and their skin had been shinny with sweat, their breathing laboured, oblivious to the brothers until Sam had gently, hesitantly called out to them, no doubt with images of taking a spear to the face forefront in his mind.

But at the sound of Sam's voice, most of the tension had left them immediately and their eyes had stopped glowing and they'd turned to the brothers with impatient expressions, wondering why they'd been interrupted.

Now, Cas looked seconds away from taking flight, his wings tensing and spreading, and Dean suddenly remembered that he'd been about to ask them to look for firewood before Cas had come running out of the little hut in naught but a pair of old jeans. _Dean's_ old jeans.

“Hey, wait!” Dean called, jogging out onto the sand. It was so wet and compact that it nearly felt like running on pavement.

Cas and Hannah both turned to watch him approach and Cas' wings relaxed a little, though they remained arched out to either side of him, as if he might take flight anyway if he decided what Dean had to say wasn't interesting enough.

“Make yourselves useful and look for firewood while you're out there,” he told them.

Their eyes immediately snapped back to each other, faces set in stoic challenge and Dean sighed, just knowing by the time they were done competing with each – they did that a lot too – he'd have half a forest worth of wood piled in the sand outside his cabin.

That was the thing about angels; issue an order, however much you don't really intend it to be one, and it was followed relentlessly. Dean had gotten better at phrasing things as requests instead of just barking orders, because it wasn't fair that their brains were wired in such a way that made them want to follow it even if they _didn't_ want to. But it was hard to remember to ask nicely when he was being distracted by Cas' muscular torso.

Hannah's wings suddenly spread and both the angels' stances widened, ready to take flight. 

Hannah barked something in Enochian and Cas barked something back and if Dean didn't know better it sounded like Hannah had issued a challenge and Cas had responded with something like _you're on_.

A half second later, Dean was backing away, out of the reach of the vortex of air generated by the powerful wingbeats. Luckily the sand wasn't dry, otherwise Dean would have been sand blasted. The two angels took off, climbing into the air with slow, powerful downbeats and he was able to keep them in sight for less than thirty seconds before the fog swallowed them whole.

“I'll never get used to that,” said Sam, his eyes still on the last patch of sky that had contained angel.

“Seeing them fly?” Dean wondered out loud, knowing he felt the same way. There was just something truly incredible about getting to see this side of Cas and it warmed his heart that Cas trusted them enough to _let_ them see it. Even if it had taken a few years.

The brothers agreed to go get the blankets from the car before anything else, as there was already a damp chill in the air, and they came back with arms laden full of old but thick and heavy wool blankets, dumping them on the wooden benches inside the cabin. The trunk of the impala had a constant stash of emergency items. A ton of blankets, several first aid kits, a Coleman camp stove with two little propane tanks. Preserves in case shit got _really_ bad, fire starters and backup GPS, fire extinguishers, there was even a two person tent stashed back there. Just in case. Living the life they did, one couldn't be too careful.

Dean took a few moments to arrange the blankets on the bench, thinking that it was far from his memory foam, but roughing it was part of camping, right? Plus, he was tired enough from the hunt that once his belly was full, he'd have been able to sleep out on the sand.

The issue of how to actually _cook_ the food came up and the brothers decided to forgo using the Coleman if they could help it and instead they each pulled on a sweater from their duffel bags and headed out to find some rocks and dig a fire pit.

With the mist and fog swallowing up their surroundings in every direction, the beach appeared vast and endless, the sand stretching for miles and miles to either side of them, disappearing into a gradual wall of grey within a half a mile. In front of them, they could hear the sound of the gentle waves lapping at the shore but could no longer see the water.

“We might have to use the stove anyway,” Sam absently remarked as they started walking, “I doubt they'll find any dry wood close by.”

“They can probably just mojo it dry.”

They'd walked towards the water, far enough now that the cabins had been swallowed by fog behind them, and now Dean really did feel like he was standing in the middle of an endlessly flat plain. It was vaguely unsettling and he glanced over his shoulder, seeing nothing but a wall of grey.

“This is kinda creepy,” Sam mumbled, an echo of if brother's thoughts, as he glanced around warily.

Dean was about to make a, likely unhelpful, comment but froze with his mouth open, the sound of something off kilter to the waves making him pause. But he knew that sound, feathers cutting through air, strong muscles pushing against it. It was either Cas or Hannah, it was impossible to tell which, but as the sound of the slow wing beats came closer, neither brother could see who it was through the fog.

The angel sailed over their heads and Sam half laughed, half grimaced, something Dean was feeling on the inside. 

“Ok, that's _super_ creepy.”

The angel had passed over them like a heartbeat, a soft and steady _thump, thump, thump_ in the silence of the fog over their heads.

“Cas?” Dean called after the fading sound.

There was the sound of wings beating fiercely and Dean could picture Cas' – he decided to assume it was Cas for now – lower body pivoting forward, his wings changing angle to push against the air more directly, flexing forward to break his speed and change his flight path.

And then the sound of nothing – gliding, Dean realized with a smile, and not a second later Cas appeared from within the fog, materializing like a ghost and sailing around them in a semi-circle descent before tucking his wings close and simply dropping to the sand, legs folding to absorb the shock.

His left foot, bare and with the cuffs of his jeans dark with moisture, landed in a puddle of water on the sand and, for a moment, it seemed to snag Cas' attention. He stayed in a crouch, stared down at the little patch of water curiously, dipping his fingers into it and Dean could easily make out the glow of blue grace in his eyes.

His eyes did that a lot now – glow blue like that – mostly when he was especially happy, like whenever he got the chance to fly. Hannah's did it too sometimes, though not as often.

Cas finally looked up from the water and to the brothers where they stood a good ten feet away, and his eyes locked on Dean as he stood slowly, his wings flexing at his back in a movement that probably meant something Dean wished he could understand.

For a moment, they stared at each other through the mist, the fine water droplets seeming to swirl around the angel like they had a mind of their own, the glow of his eyes cutting through the blurr, and Dean suddenly found himself recalling the Disney scene where Pochahontas and John Smith met for the first time. 

Heat punched into his face in embarrassment.

Although, it wasn't all that dissimilar, he supposed. He and Castiel were farther apart than even John and Pochahontas. Separated not only by race, custom and home land, but by species, millennia and entire galaxies. Pochahontas had loved John, and it was her love for him that ended up killing her.

Dean thought of all the times Cas had nearly died – _actually_ died once or twice – because of his connection to Dean. Because of the fact that he didn't seem to be able to stay away. Dean wasn't so arrogant to say that the naivety and blind trust Cas seemed to have in him was love or anything close to it, but more than once the bond they shared had hurt Cas badly.

So maybe it was better this way, Dean thought even as his throat tightened and Cas came closer. Maybe it's better that Cas had Hannah. She was so much better for him than Dean ever had been. With Dean, Cas would only end up dead, or worse. 

He plastered on a smile when Cas came to stand in front of him and Sam, his expression grave. 

“We've not found any wood yet, wet or dry,” he informed them, as if reporting the progress of a mission.

The twitch in Dean's lips was genuine this time. “Well, worse comes to worse we have some emergency fire starters in the trunk,” Dean reassured him.

“There is a forest off the coast a few miles North of here,” Castiel said serenely, before he blinked and looked down at his feet, taking a step back as if he'd suddenly found he was standing on something.

“What's wrong?” asked Sam and both he and Dean stared at the fading footprints from where the angel's had been, the wet sand already swelling and filling in the imprints.

“Clams,” Castiel explained. “The air bubbles tickle.” 

As if on que, a few little bubbles popped on the surface right where Cas had been standing.

“Oh man, fresh steamed clams would be _so_ incredible,” Sam moaned, as if the food was already in his mouth.

Dean considered it, thinking of the small pot and frying pan that went with the camping stove they had. 

“I might be able to make that happen...I think,” he added, trying to work out the logistics of it. The pot was small but he could do them in batches. And he had a bottle of wine he'd bought – both Cas and Hannah preferred the milder taste on their turbo charged taste buds than they did whiskey or beer – as well as a bottle of generic spice and some not-rotten vegetables and something that had looked close to being steak that he'd picked up at the little market. He'd bought bread too, not thinking they had no toaster, and a couple other staples to give them several options on what to cook.

It wouldn't be five-star but he could manage something better than edible. 

“Yeah, we can do that.”

“Awesome! Tell me where to dig!” Sam said, rubbing his hands together. Seafood was to Sam as steak was to Dean and he'd seen the guy near drool over bacon wrapped scallops and fancy whiskey steamed muscles more than once. But, like steak, that shit was expensive and they didn't often get it.

But here the fucking things were growing in the god damn sand for free.

“Look for the bubbles,” Castiel told them absently, his glowing eyes flicking this way and that up at the sky like he could see through the fog and was looking for Hannah. “They are quite deep down...” he trailed off with a frown, eyes now fixed off over the water.

“What's wrong?”

“Hannah found some wood.”

He looked pissed about it, his eyes flashing white before turning blue again. 

“But...we _need_ wood,” Dean reminded him slowly, knowing he was probably missing something.

Castiel's gaze snapped down to him, looking annoyed. “Yes, I know. But I haven't found any yet and she can't get _more_ than me.”

Sam and Dean shared a look.

"Why, exactly?”

Castiel's wings froze in the air, ready to lift him off the ground. He levelled Dean with an incredulous stare. “Because then she'll _win_. Unacceptable.”

And then Cas was gone in a whirlwind, swallowed up by the fog over their heads once more, the sound of his wings beating at the air fading quickly.

The brothers spent the next hour going back to the car to get the single, fold up shovel they had in there and emptying a small tool box to gather the clams in. They brought the single pot and frying pan back to the huts and then retraced their faded footprints back down the beach to where they had been. It took less than half an hour to fill the little toolbox, but there was barely enough there to feed two of them, much less two angels; bottomless pits that they were. So they headed back to dump the clams so they could refill the box again.

When they got back to the cabins the second time, both brothers stumbled to a halt and then simultaneously doubled over laughing. 

Two massive piles of dead wood had been left on the sand twenty feet from the cabin the brothers had claimed. Some driftwood, some old sticks and split logs and entire tree branches here and there. One pile was noticeably bigger than the other.

Hannah suddenly swooped out of the sky, her sleek, dove grey wings blending like camouflage with the mist around her and if Dean hadn't happened to be looking in the exact direction she'd arrived from he'd have never known she was there with how silently she slipped through the air.

She simply grinned at them, her eyes shining brightly. “I'm winning,” she smugly declared.

From within the mist over their heads, Dean could hear the sound of Castiel's wing beats approaching but, opposite of what he expected to happen – hear a sudden stretch of silence and see Cas drop from the fog to the ground – instead an entire tree trunk came barrelling out of the swirling mist, falling without a sound until it hit the sand with a compact thud, sending vibrations out to tickle up Dean's legs and shove his heart up into his throat.

“ _Cas!_ ” Sam nearly squealed, leaping back from the gigantic log even though he was well out of harms way.

“That doesn't count!” Hannah snapped up at a patch of fog just as Castiel dropped from it, landing on his feet gracefully beside the tree he'd just dropped.

“It _does_ count,” he countered calmly, looking as smug as she had a moment ago. “At no point was it defined in which form the wood need be. Naught but volume was established, therefor, _it counts_. I have produced the most volume in burnable wood – therefor, I win.”

The blue in Hannah's eyes flashed white with annoyance but she said nothing and Castiel's smirk was mostly in his eyes, but it was evident none the less and Dean had to bite his lip to keep from outright laughing because they two of them were honestly so ridiculous sometimes. Who knew angels tended to get in to petty competition with each other just like humans do.

Cas turned away from her with his chin in the air, his wings flicking, feathers lifting prim and haughty in a way that was definitely meant to provoke Hannah's ire and Sam snorted beside him.

For a while after that, while Sam and Dean decided to forgo rocks to line the fire pit and just started digging a hole, Castiel and Hannah argued. Which is the say, Castiel sat down on his tree while Hannah outlined exactly why he _hadn't_ won and he tersely defended his victory.

Twenty minutes into it and Dean sat back on his heals, wondering if he should get them to help him and Sam go find more clams because then at least they'd stop their bickering. Though it did not appear to be escalating the same way Sam and Dean's bickering usually escalated. It kind of sounded like two lawyers yammering on in the background, throwing around big words to defend their cases against just who had won the wood gathering challenge.

Long after the grace had faded from their eyes and he heard them start to get into the chemical composition of different geneses of trees, Dean pushed himself to his feet with a groan.

“Alright you two, shut up!” he snapped, making sure to keep his tone light. Though, with them, things as subtle as tone of voice were often lost on them; even Cas, after all this time, just didn't seem able to pick up on things like that a lot of the time. If Dean didn't say it outright, make it clear, then Cas would take what he said at face value. Often times that would leave him worried, hurt or thinking he'd done something wrong when he hadn't. It had taken Dean a solid effort to tamper his ingrained urge to snap everything he said or soften intention and emotion with sarcasm. But he was getting better at it, he thought. 

Cas and Hannah's jaw clipped shut but they turned equally annoyed looks upon him, instantly banding together in an invisible but palpable truce to combat a common enemy.

Dean felt his shoulders tighten almost subconsciously. There was nothing quite like the sight of two angels suddenly turning identical looks of petulant angelic irritation on you to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Sam covered a laugh beside him by abruptly turning it into a cough and Dean rolled his shoulders, the weight of the angels' silence and attention making him want to move.

“We need more clams,” he muttered, heat pushing into his face when he felt the weight of Sam's amused gaze.

This time Cas and Hannah did not immediately turn it into a competition and merely continued to stare at him silently, their wings folded loose and at ease against their backs – a contrast to their stoic gazes – as if awaiting orders.

“So could you go find some, please?” Of course he had to spell it out for them. Though sometimes he got the feeling they knew just what he wasn't saying and acted like they didn't to make him say it anyway.

Cas' chin tilted up almost imperceptibly and his eyes rolled sideways at the same time Hannah's did. They appeared to confer silently with each other until -

“Fine,” Castiel answered. “How many?”

Dean blinked. “Well...I dunno...here,” he picked up the empty tool kit. “Fill this. No more than what can fit in here, though, ok?” he added firmly, handing the kit over and eyeing the two giant piles of wood behind him.

Cas didn't roll his eyes, but it was a near thing, and Dean felt his lips twitch in response.

“Fine.”

The fog was still thick, swallowing up Cas and Hannah as they walked over the sand and back towards the beach, fading from sight like a mirage.

As Dean went about setting up the fire pit and getting the fire started with Sam, we wondered how many times and over how many eons Cas might have walked over the sand of other beaches, all over the world. Maybe even on different planets. Had he stood on the fresh shores of a young earth where only vegetation grew on land and everything else was in the ocean? Had he stared out over the sea wondering what might some day come out of it? Would he have been able to feel the sand under his feet in his true form? There wouldn't have been anything for him to take as a vessel then. Did he even have feet?

Dean's thoughts took him well through to the point where the fire was burning strongly, both he and Sam standing around it, staring aimlessly, pulled down into the hypnotic snare of the fire.

Eventually Dean managed to tear his gaze from the flames and suggest they drag the giant tree over in front of the pit so they could have something to sit on. It took both of them heaving and grunting and complaining to drag it the ten feet across the sand – and it wasn't like either of them were light weights – and Dean was left marvelling at the fact that Castiel had not only managed to lift it into the air and keep a grip on it, but also had managed to fly with it. There had definitely been some grace involved in _that_ trick.

With a glance down at his watch, Dean realized that the angels had been gone for longer than would be needed to find a few more clams and he told Sam he was going to find them. 

“You want me to come?” 

Sam's face had that ever present look of anticipatory concern, his eyes trying to dig into the thick fog around them.

“Nah, stay here and make sure the fire doesn't go out.”

He started off in the general direction of where he remembered Cas talking about the air bubbles tickling his feet and it wasn't long before he found them. He could hear them bickering in Enochian. And it _was_ bickering too. He could tell even through the harsh, guttural sounds of their native language that they were bickering; words which Dean had to take pains and long seconds to pronounce correctly were whipping between them in a blur of harsh sounds that Dean could never help to understand even if he spent his entire life trying to learn their language.

He didn't bother trying to be quiet – they probably heard him coming a mile off – but the urge to watch the two of them interacting without the knowledge of his presence was always just there in the back of his head. Cas acted differently around Hannah. He was more at ease, more _himself_ , when he thought Dean or Sam weren't around, and Dean had yet to figure out just why that was. It made him sad – really sad – to know that Cas wasn't nearly as comfortable around him as he'd once thought. Dean both very badly wanted to march up to the angel and demand just why that was and simultaneously never wanted to know. 

The only thing he could figure was that Dean was a hunter. But that had never bothered Cas before. At least, Dean thought it hadn't...until he'd seen how at ease Castiel could be when he had one of his kin close by. Almost like he could allow his guard down now that there was another angel to have his back. Like he thought Sam or Dean would ever hurt him. Like he was wary of them. Like he was scared of them and Dean just hadn't been aware of it until he saw Cas let his guard down for the first time.

It was unsettling and a little heartbreaking and Dean desperately wanted to ask Sam if he was seeing that same things as he was but, well. That just wasn't something Dean could articulate. 

As his luck would have it, both Cas and Hannah were so invested in their bickering that they didn't seem to hear him approach. 

He stopped just where he was close enough to see them clearly through the fog, taking in the still surreal sight of two angels just...being angels, in such a normal setting.

Cas and Hannah were crouched on the ground, their wings down over their shoulders with the large joints resting on the wet sand, holding them up like an extra pair of hands. Cas was elbow deep in the hole he had dug but was still scooping out sand and adding it to the pile next to him. When he leaned down again, the joint of his wing pushed into the sand, sliding out an inch or two, digging into the dirt.

Hannah shifted, re-positioning her wings and scooting back a foot or two from the hole she had dug and started digging a new one.

Cas pulled free a clam, tossing it into the nearly full tool kit and then shifting back a few feet as well to start digging again. 

They'd stopped bickering at least, working now in silence, and Dean tried not to feel like a creep as he watched them. He didn't really understand where this new found fascination of his had come from, but he couldn't seem to get enough of watching Cas – how he behaved and spoke and moved – ever since he'd started noticing he was doing those things differently now.

Cas moved with a fluidity he couldn't seem to achieve when his wings were hidden. For that matter, so did Hannah, and Dean now suspected there was a reason behind why every angel he'd ever met looked like they had a stick up their ass. It must be extremely uncomfortable to sever a piece of yourself and stash it in another plane of existence, and both Cas and Hannah's entire body language changed immediately whenever they had to hide their wings; back to the stiff posture and limited movements and tense muscles. 

It bothered Dean more and more, every time he had to watch them move with such – now obvious – discomfort, and he wished they lived in a world where Cas and Hannah could be themselves and be comfortable without the threat of death or being carted off to area 51 for dissection. But, sadly, that wasn't the kind of world they lived in.

Castiel lifted one of his wings, leaning more heavily onto the other, and stretched it out to the side with a grimace like it had cramped. All around the big, bony joint Dean could see that the feathers were wet and sandy, matted in a way he knew the angel would likely find irritating once his focus shifted from the task at hand. But then Cas folded the wing back and pressed the ball of the joint back into the ground and kept digging.

Finally, Dean moved forward, now passing into super-creeper territory with his staring, and let his feet fall heavily.

Both the angels startled all the same, their heads snapping up and hands slapping palms down onto the sand so that their wings could raise and arc out in case of the need to take immediate flight.

“Just me,” Dean assured them with a lopsided grin, even though their wings were already lowering.

“Is this enough?” Castiel asked, gesturing to the tool kit and wiping at his forehead with the back of his wrist. His long fingers were coated with wet sand.

Dean chuckled, bending down to grab the kit full of clams. “Yeah, guys, this is great. Come on, we got the fire going.”

Angels didn't really get cold, but only because they didn't let it happen. Something about feeding grace into their blood or something. But another thing Dean had learned was that Angels were notorious heat lovers. 

It didn't matter the source, whether it be the fireplace in the bunker's sitting room, the hot air blasting through the impala's vents or a patch of sunlight on the ground, Cas and Hannah would crowd around the source like they'd been seconds from perishing to frost bite.

Dean fondly remembered when, last month, he and Sam had come home from a grocery run with an electric blanket. 

The angels hadn't known what the hell it was at first, but after Sam had explained it to them and then plugged it into the outlet next to their nest of blankets. Both of them had grabbed at the warming fabric, tugging it close and murmuring words to each other Dean didn't catch. Their wings had still been fluffy, feathers in disarray from a day of flying, and they'd curled up together in their nest with their new blanket.

Sam had made an irritating cooing noise when they'd walked into the sitting room and spotted the two angels and Dean had had to refrain from outright growling. But he knew they would both like the blanket he'd found, thank you very much, even though he'd bought it more for Cas because, well, that's just how it was. But Dean was not going to let his jealousy change how he treated either Cas or Hannah. His...issues where Castiel was concerned were his own problems and he was done projecting his own anger and self loathing onto other people. Cas – and Hannah – didn't deserve to be snapped at constantly and get the cold shoulder from one of the few friends they had and, as anyone would, they would have eventually assumed Dean's treatment meant he disliked them and would have left. 

And that, watching Cas walk away again, knowing he'd driven him away again, just wasn't an option.

It was hard sometimes, to keep the roiling mix of emotions under control. But it helped, being able to make Cas happy. Seeing him snuggling down under the blanket he'd gotten the angel had calmed the hurt digging a hole in his chest.

When they got back to Sam and the fire, he was in much the same position Dean had left him in. Sitting on the tree Castiel had found, staring into the flames. Only now he had a long stick in his hand and was jabbing absently at the coals.

The two small pots and a cast iron frying pan were sitting on the sand next to the fire pit; but as Dean came to a stop, he realized the one thing they were missing.

“We don't have a grate,” he said aloud.

“Yeah, I just thought of that too.” Sam stood and stretched his arms over his head with a groan. 

Dean sighed. “Shit, how are we gonna boil the water?”

Beside him, he felt Castiel look over and turned his head out of habit. 

“A flat stone would do, don't you think?” There was a hint of a smile around Cas' full lips and it snagged Dean's attention momentarily.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I guess.” 

Hannah suddenly waltzed right between them, the kit of clams still under her arm, and she went to stand beside Sam.

“Well, why don't you and Castiel go find a stone and Sam and I will clean these.” She jiggled the box of clams with a smirk, her eyes on Cas.

Sam's brow dropped in confusion, the same way it did when he was working on translating an obscure text or trying to do ridiculously tricky math in his head. His brown eyes slid from Hannah, to Cas, then lingered on Dean before landing on Hannah again. She looked up at him and apparently Sam read something in her face because his frown smoothed out and he stood abruptly, holding out his hands.

Hannah handed the kit to him with a smile and Dean stared.

Was...was Hannah trying to get some time alone with Sam?

Several emotions were suddenly pushing up against Dean's skin and he blinked rapidly, frozen in the midst of the sudden onslaught. Sam was walking away towards the little foot washing station where fresh water was pumped in, with Hannah walking close at his side.

“Dean, come on,” Castiel called to him patiently. “I saw some large stones farther down the shore line that should work.”

He tore his eyes away from where his brother and Hannah were crouching down by the water pump, rinsing off the clam shells one at a time, their hands close enough under the meagre stream of water that they kept bumping together.

Dean wondered if he wasn't reading too much in to things. After all, it had become obvious over the last few months that Castiel and Hannah felt something for each other. No one spent as much time together as they did – got as close as they did – without there being some kind of romantic feelings involved.

The maelstrom inside him calmed and that familiar dull ache returned. He wondered if he might be ok if it turned out Hannah _did_ have something with Sam, because then that meant she _didn't_ with Cas. But he refused to follow that train of thought, feeling guilty already. Cas was happy with Hannah and everyone was safe and happy and healthy. Dean told himself that that was more than enough; more than he ever thought he would have, and the realization buoyed his mood.

He turned to Cas with a smile. “Lead the way.”

* * *

The walk down the beach took them nearly half an hour and Dean spent most of it staring at Cas. He seemed to do little else these days but he was well past the point of caring. It didn't seem to bother Cas, on the rare occasion he noticed at all, so Dean didn't bother tempering the urge unless Sam was around. Because Sam definitely noticed.

Castiel's wings were folded loosely against his back, his feathers soft and a little dishevelled, just like the rest of him. He was still barefoot and wearing nothing but the pair of jeans that Dean had long since outgrown and the mist was clinging to the angel's skin like morning dew clung to grass.

He let his eyes trail over the arches of Castiel's dark wings, lingering on the lighter browns and then sliding down to where the dark chocolate turned to burnt amber near the tips.

Dean had a theory about Castiel's wings and why they looked like they did. Not the colors, he knew well now, after a lengthy discussion between Hannah and Sam that he had pretended not to be listening to, that the colors of an angel's wings were unique and unchangeable. Different colors meant a whole slew of different things, of which they had not even began to discuss at the time.

No, Dean's idea was that Castiel probably used to have immaculate wings. Sleek and perfect just like Hannah's, not a feather out of place. Back when he was commander of a garrison and had to look the part, Dean had no doubt that Cas would have kept his wings absolutely perfect, just like he knew a heavenly warrior would be expected to.

But now that he didn't have that responsibility on his shoulders anymore, Dean liked to think that maybe Cas was going au-natural where it concerned his wings; comfortable enough now to just be himself and not worry about being disciplined for it.

“You're smiling again,” Castiel remarked gently, his voice as soft as the mist that surrounded them. “You do that a lot now,” he added with a smile of his own.

“Well, I've got a lot to smile about,” Dean chuckled, his grin widening. 

Glancing sideways he caught Cas' eye, delighting in the way his grace flashed blue behind them for a second. 

Castiel sighed, turned to stare ahead while they kept walking side by side, that small smile still curling his lips. “I enjoy seeing you happy for a change.”

Deep down low in Dean's gut, something fluttered and he huffed a gruff laugh, looking down at the sand.

“Could say the same about you.”

“Could you?”

When he looked over, the angel's expression was one of mild curiosity and Dean huffed a laugh. 

“Of course, Cas,” he told the sand disappearing under his feet. His felt his cheeks warm and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Of course I like seeing you happy. I've seen you hurting too many times,” he added quietly. _I don't ever want to see it again, if I can help it._

A not uncomfortable silence settled over them, but Dean couldn't let it rest. In the softness of the misty atmosphere around them, now felt like a fragile enough moment of peace to maybe find some peace of his own.

So he took a deep breath. “Hannah makes you happy,” he said, trying to keep his voice as casual as possible. He still didn't phrase it as a question.

“Yes, she does. I love Hannah,” Castiel said, his voice as delicate as the mist. “We are closer now than we ever could have been while serving in different garrisons or when we were both still tied to heaven. Though we were always close.” Dean didn't look – _couldn't_ look while Cas was talking about Hannah with such warmth in his voice – but he could hear the angel’s smile. “Our garrison leaders thought the same thing. _Too_ close, they believed. And before the dark ages to keep us busy there wasn't much to do and it frequently got boring, watching over earth. We,” a laugh huffed from Castiel's chest and it was such an uncharacteristically unintentional sounds that Dean looked up to stare at Cas' profile, his own lips tugging into a grin. Cas was smiling with the fondness of a good memory, “We kept sneaking away from our posts to find something more interesting to do. We spent a few years in India once, moving around with a pack of Bengal tigers.”

Not the kind of fun he assumed Cas was talking about, though Dean should have seen that coming, since he knew Cas was still a virgin. Though he supposed that didn't mean the two of them hadn't been romantically involved anyway. You didn't need to have sex to love someone. 

“So now that you don't have a commander breathing down your neck...?”

Castiel looked up, his head tilting a few inches to the left.

“I mean, now that you two are free to...do whatever you want.”

Cas' gentle smile returned and he looked ahead. In the distance, a peninsula was starting to take shape in the fog.

“I missed flying. Being able to manifest my wings now is just as satisfying as flying in my true form. I only wish that more of my kin would see things as Hannah does and leave. Come back to Earth or find other planets to call home. Heaven was not so...confining as it is now. It is a development that only happened in the last few hundred years. This rigid, unforgiving, tyrannical reign where questions mean torture and disobedience means death.” Castiel's voice had gone hard, his smile gone. 

Dean glanced back and saw that his wings were folded tight and rigid at his back and he frowned.

“We had freedom once,” Castiel continued. “We could walk the Earth and be trusted to go where we were needed without,” he glanced sideways, “Without someone breathing down our necks.” He sighed heavily, flexing his wings like he only just realized how stiffly he was holding them. “And then, one day, everything changed. We were...dragged back to heaven. All at once, without the courtesy of even a summons. It was the first act against us that took away our free will and we never got it back.”

Castiel huffed another laugh, looking back up at Dean with an easy smile and suddenly loose posture. “Well, until I met you and your brother.”

A cloud of butterflies exploded in Dean's chest and he grinned wide, feeling a little giddy.

“Yeah well, nobody tells a Winchester what to do. That includes the adopted ones.”

Castiel blinked, looking both stunned and like Dean had just handed him a puppy and Dean slowed to a stop when Cas did, giving the angel an encouraging lopsided grin when he realised he'd thought this a thousand times but had never said it out loud.

“Come to think of it, we should probably get you an ID. Hannah too,” he rolled his bottom lip between his teeth, unsure if he should say what he was about to. “Castiel Winchester. Sound good to you?”

When two spots of colour appeared high on Castiel's cheeks, Dean felt like he could breathe again but there wasn't enough air around and his fingers twitched with the urge to reach up and feel the heat coming off Castiel's tanned skin.

Cas' full lips parted twice but then he just nodded, bobbing his head and looking down at where he was fiddling with his hands, that same soft smile back on his lips.

Dean allowed himself to reach up and briefly squeeze Cas' shoulder.

Except it didn't end up being brief because he got distracted by the feel of soft feathers brushing against the back of his fingers and the deep blue eyes Castiel raised to his and then his hand was inching up the side of Cas' neck and how the hell did that happen?

Dean swallowed, a hazy, far away voice telling him to take his hand _off_ the spoken-for angel. It whispered that he'd already missed his many, many chances and not to fuck things up for them. But god dammit they were already so close and Cas' pink tongue darted out to wet his full, plump lips and all Dean would have to do is just lean down...a few...inches...and...

Castiel's lips were suddenly against his, soft and shy and a little hesitant and a bunch of other things Dean couldn't process because his brain was short circuiting and his gut was swooping like he'd just fallen off the top of a sky scraper.

He pushed closer, the hand he had on the side of Castiel's neck smoothing back down over his shoulder, the other grabbing at his muscular bicep, both working to tug Cas closer. 

Kissing Cas was everything Dean had always imagined it would be. Soft and charged and gentle but with a thrum of power running under Cas' hesitant touch that made him feel dizzy.

Dean let their lips slide together, felt a breath shudder from Castiel's chest and ghost over his mouth. It trembled all the way down through Dean's chest and to his toes.

When the tips of his fingers touched the fine hairs at the base of Cas' neck, Dean suddenly realized just what the hell he was doing and abruptly pulled back, feeling dizzy and breathing hard.

He blinked down at Cas, who was still staring dazedly at his mouth, cheeks flushed, lips shining and eyes wide. Behind him, the feathers all along the leading edges of his wings had fluffed up.

He looked fucking gorgeous and Dean swallowed convulsively, wanting nothing more than to reach out and pull Cas close, kiss the angel until his legs gave out, but already a ball of guilt was gathering in his gut like a swallowed stone.

“Shit...” he took a step back, dragging a hand over his tingling lips. “Fuck, Cas, I'm sorry.” He thought of Hannah, back at the cabins with Sam, helping him get their dinner ready, and felt his stomach sink further. “ _Fuck_.”

He ran a hand through his hair, tugged on it till it hurt, cursed a few more times.

“Dean?” 

He looked up, unable to keep the guilt off his face. Cas was looking at him with wide eyes, confusion eroding the punch-drunk expression from before.

“What's...what's wrong?”

“What's...” Dean stared incredulously. “We just...and you're already...you and Hannah are...”

Dean never had been good at articulating when something important was going down but this was a new low, he was sure, and Castiel was looking more and more confused and more and more like the puppy Dean had given him had just been run over by a truck.

“We can't...I mean we shouldn't have...we should just go find that rock,” he finished in the lamest most unsmooth and insensitive escape from a conversation he'd ever made.

Castiel's eyes narrowed. “Are you going to finish any of those other sentences?”

Dean blinked, opened his mouth but nothing came out.

“Hannah,” Cas repeated, his voice and face giving nothing away, but somehow sounding definitive.

Dean desperately tried to think of something, anything, to say that would help fix the angelic stoicism settling over Castiel's face, but he couldn't seem to get anything past the lump in his throat.

Castiel took a step back and the tips of Dean's fingers just missed the angel when he made an aborted reach.

“Go back to the fire, Dean. I will get the stone.”

“N-no, I -”

“It's fine,” Cas took another step back, his wings ruffling briefly, the feathers all realigning themselves.

The chill of another missed opportunity was pressing up Dean's throat and he swallowed. 

“Ok.” He felt sick. “I'll...I'll meet you back at the fire.”

With legs shaking so badly they threatened to give out, Dean turned and walked back the way he had come. Behind him, the sound of Castiel taking flight preceded the gust of wind that hit his back.

* * *

Dean reached the fire before Castiel did, glancing down at the two pots of washed clams before sitting heavily on the tree trunk beside Sam. 

Hannah looked over her shoulder and then her eyes turned skyward briefly before they landed on Dean.

“Where is Castiel?”

He couldn't look at her, a fresh wave of guilt washing over him. He picked up the stick Sam had been using to poke at the fire and jabbed at the glowing coals. 

“He uh, went to find a rock by himself.”

He could feel both Sam and Hannah's gazes turn heavier somehow and he cleared his throat, trying to keep his muscles from becoming too tense and giving him away.

But it was at that moment that he remembered that Hannah was perfectly capable of reading his mind and he blanched, his head snapping up to stare at her with his blood frozen in his veins.

She merely blinked back at him impassively.

“You're being weird,” Sam declared bluntly.

“No I'm not,” snapped Dean, purely out of reflex.

“Did you and Cas have a fight?”

Hannah's gaze sharpened and Dean flinched.

“Dude, _no_ , fucking drop it already.”

With his knack for impromptu timing, Cas chose that moment to soar over them and drop a long, flat, oblong stone from the sky and it hit the sand off to Hannah's right with a dull thud; Castiel himself followed closely behind it, dropping from the fog and landing on his feet.

His blue eyes found Hannah immediately and she stared back. Castiel's brow furrowed then Hannah's did as well before she glanced over at Dean and then back to Cas.

Dean felt bile pushing up his throat and he took a deep breath as quietly as he could.

God he'd fucked up so bad. Hannah new something was up. God dammit why had he kissed Cas? He knew the angel was spoken for and it was his own god damn fault he hadn't just gotten his shit together and told Cas how he felt the million and a half times the universe had lined up the opportunity for him. Now Cas finally had something – though maybe he'd had it all along if that story about the tigers was anything to go by – with Hannah, someone he loved and trusted and who loved and trusted him back, and Dean had just gone and royally fucked it up for him.

Cas had picked up the stone and placed it gently over the low burning coals. It was long and flat and thin, probably shale by the look of it; perfect for setting the pots on to boil. His finger tips lingered on it and then the stone glowed red hot.

Hannah stood from the stump she had been sitting on, walking behind where Cas was crouched by the fire and dragging her fingers through the feathers at the top of his left wing to get his attention. 

“Castiel, can you help me with something in the cabin?”

Dean felt his guts curdle. It was so obviously a _we need to talk immediately_ thing.

Castiel stood, his right wing flicking out then folding against his back and it was a movement Dean didn't know how to read. He watched them disappear into the cabin they had claimed.

When they came back out almost twenty minutes later, Dean had managed to calm down but upon seeing the look of deep irritation on Castiel's face and the worried look on Hannah's, Dean heart began pounding again.

Maybe he could fix it, he told himself. Maybe he could take Hannah aside and tell her that he'd just had a moment of weakness. He could come clean and tell her a little about how he felt about Cas, tell her he had it under control now. Maybe she wouldn't hate him too much. Maybe she wouldn't get angry at Cas if he told her it had all been Dean. He certainly knew he should _not_ tell her how Cas had kissed him back; certainly not about how enthusiastically he'd done so.

But the thought of confessing to Hannah what he'd done made his stomach churn and he turned back to check the pots sitting on the hot stone. There was steam billowing out from under the lid, which meant the clams would almost be done and he grabbed the handle, shimmied the pot a bit to resettle them, and tried to breath in the smell of whisky reducing down, wishing he could find a little courage from it just like he would a drink.

Castiel strode past him, Sam and the fire, walking off into the mist with the air of someone who wanted very much to get away from a situation they did not know how to handle and Dean looked to Sam out of habit for reassurance that his brother was seeing the same thing he was.

But Sam was looking at Hannah, his brow creased as she trailed Castiel for only a few feet before coming to a stop next to the fire with a heavy sigh.

“Everything ok?” Sam asked carefully.

A few seconds later, when Castiel was out of sight – Dean wondered why he hadn’t flown – Hannah finally turned and sat down right on the sand, the large joints of her wings slipping down over her shoulders and the tips crossing behind her. 

She looked...forlorn, was the only word that came to Dean's mind.

She took a deep breath, “He is so stupid,” he breathed out, sounding more frustrated than she looked. “And _stubborn_. And _headstrong_.”

Absently, her finger tips dragged through the sand in front of her, barely enough to carve shallow grooves, as she stared into the fire.

“Just a few of many qualities he possesses that made him such a great commander. To persist when others would have fallen back. To push when others would have retreated. To endure when others would have broken...” she blinked, took another breath, and looked over at the brothers. “Castiel has been a soldier for the entirety of his three hundred million odd years of existence, and I think...” she hesitated, looking off in the direction Castiel had disappeared in, “I think he is frustrated with how difficult he finds it to let go of that part of himself.”

Dean's concern shifted from potentially ruining Cas and Hannah's relationship to Cas himself. He hadn't known Cas was struggling with something. He'd seemed to happy, recently, so carefree and himself.

“What do you mean?” he asked, trying not to sound too snappy. Concern usually did that to him, made him snappy.

Hannah looked back from the mist, her grey eyes flicking between the brothers. 

“He's overwhelmed by his freedom,” she told them plainly.

It was both completely understandable and out of Dean's comprehension, like he was quite sure he understood perfectly until he thought about it and it slipped away into something obscure.

“Can you explain what you mean by that?” Sam asked gently.

The pots started whistling and Dean clumsily pulled them off the rock and set them on the sand as Hannah started talking.

“What you must understand is that even though heaven was never as rigid as it has been the last few hundred years, nor were we free to do as we pleased before that. In comparison, some angels may _think_ of the time before heaven's sudden crack down as something like freedom, but only because we really didn't understand what true freedom was. We have always been under the expectation of strict obedience and have always acted with the threat of pain should we step out of line. Even if that meant something as simple as staying a month longer or less at a post you were assigned.

“Castiel is young, by angelic standards. One of the youngest, actually. And he was created out of necessity rather than love. Our father needed more soldiers and so he made them. What resulted from that was a wave of brand-new fledglings that did not have the luxury of time to be taught just _what_ they were. Instead of communing with their brothers and sisters and learning what it meant to be part of the Host and part of a family, they were given a weapon, branded with battle sigils and sent to war.”

In Hannah's eyes, tears suddenly swam. 

“A being made of light, whose very _essence_ is creation, should not learn death before it learns itself. What Castiel and so many others were forced to become was not fair. Such savagery goes against our very nature. A powerful force of creation, made for the sole purpose to destroy?” She shook her head, the firelight glinted behind her eyes. “It was _wrong_. It is wrong _still_.”

She hastily wiped away her tears before they could fall. “What I am trying to say is that Castiel, and many others, are finding this sudden calm very disconcerting. For the first time they have nothing to fight. No battle to plan, no enemy to kill…and with the war in their heads quiet, they're starting to feel dormant instincts. Because they've never had the chance to truly learn what they are, they think these natural thoughts and urges are foreign, instead of the other way around.

“Castiel is struggling to accept that angels _were_ made to feel things – how else could you expect beings of creation to care for our Father's world without compassion and love – of _course_ we were meant to feel.”

She sighed sharply. “But they've never felt it before – they didn't know how – and now it's being forced onto them just like the blades had been forced into their hands and what should be natural is now frightening to them.”

The crackle and pop of the fire filled the silence at the end of her speech and the brothers were left reeling. 

Dean felt ill. It wasn't often he got a glimpse into Castiel's past, or what it really meant when he said he was a ‘Warrior of God’, but this...this was too fucking tragic.

“So,” Sam said, his voice sounding a little tight. He cleared his throat and tried again, “So when you say instincts, do you mean like all the flying and stuff?”

Hannah nodded. “Flying just because it is enjoyable was not something Castiel ever did before I...” she closed her eyes, pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, her wings shifting. “Can you imagine that? A creature of flight not ever flying unless it necessitated a purpose. A sad truth for hundreds of young ones.”

“So the blankets – the nest – in the sitting room...” Sam trailed off.

Hannah smiled. “Another instinct, an _indulgence_ in his mind. To rest with kin, to be safe, to want to be close to other angels.”

Dean's head was spinning. He pictured Cas and Hannah curled up in their giant nest of blankets in the sitting room; thought of how comfortable Cas always looked when they did that. How he would sleepily snuggle closer to Hannah or how they would both try to cover the other with a wing.

Had Cas really gone his entire life without anything like that?

“He seemed so happy recently,” Dean eventually managed to say. “I didn't realize he was...” he cleared his throat roughly, dragged a hand down his face.

Hannah was quick to reassure him, her eyes wide and earnest. “He _has_ been happier, Dean, more than I've ever seen him. He's beginning to learn that there is nothing shameful or sinful about wanting and enjoying things, that he does not always need to be a soldier first and Castiel second. But it is a slow process, unlearning all that.”

“Suppose it would be,” Sam muttered. “Jesus, I had no idea. He's so...” Sam's hands flailed, looking for the right word.

“Stoic?” Dean supplied dully, poking at the fire with his stick.

“Quiet,” said Sam. “He never says anything about what he's thinking or feeling. He never asks for things he wants or tells us when something is bothering him. I guess I just assumed nothing _could_ bother him or that he didn't _want_ anything. But after what you just said, Hannah, I think our perception of angels has been way off, given we learned everything we know about them from one who doesn't even understand himself.”

Hannah grimaced, tucking her chin behind her arms where they were folded over her knees. 

“I only hope this peace lasts long enough that he and the others _can_ learn themselves.”

Silence settled between them heavily.

Until Hannah suddenly looked away from the fire again, and focused on Dean.

“I think, Dean, that you should go find Castiel.”

There was a palpable weight behind both her words and her gaze and Dean tried hard not to read too much into it. There did not seem to be any hostility there, at least.

And anyway, after what he'd just heard, how could he not? His legs had been twitching with the urge to go find the angel as it was; so he stood and walked off in the direction Cas had taken, not bothering to hide the speed of his eager steps.

He hadn't known, couldn't have realized, that Castiel was struggling. For the first time since meeting the angel he had appeared to actually _not_ be struggling with anything. Now he gets a bomb shell dropped on his head, that Cas actually doesn't know how to handle the fact that he feels _happy_ and _likes_ doing things like flying and cuddling up with his own kin.

It was a sad thing to realize, just how far removed Castiel's experiences were compared to Dean's. He suddenly felt incredibly ill equipped to help the angel, wondered if an entire fleet of psychologists would even be able to reverse three hundred fucking million years of brain washing like that.

Nothing ever seemed to be easy for Castiel. The fact that he, someone who had wings, could feel wrong by how right using those wings just for fun felt...it made Dean feel like he'd swallowed rocks and they were tugging his stomach down.

He found Cas at the edge of the water.

First, he heard the sound of the waves lapping gently at the shore, then Castiel himself materialized out of the mist, standing a few feet into the water, far enough that it was up to his ankles. His wings were loose at his back, feathers perpetually ruffled. He wondered if not keeping his wings immaculate had been something he'd felt guilty about too.

“Cas?” he called once he'd reached the edge of the water.

The angel gave a start, obviously having been lost in thought, and turned with his wings twitching at his back, the tips of the longest, golden brown flight feathers actually dipped in the water a few inches.

“Sorry,” Dean said with what he hoped was an easy smile. “Didn't mean to startle you. You ok?” he asked when Castiel remained silent.

Cas visibly hesitated, his mouth opening a fraction of a second before he actually spoke. “I – yes.” He looked down and moved his leg, seemingly fascinated by the eddies of water generated by his movements.

Now that he knew what to look for, it was easy to spot the lie. It wasn't even a deflection, it was just a lie. Castiel was not fine, but the question was how did Dean bring that up – let Cas know that he knew – without getting the angel's back up. He could just say it like it is, tell Cas Hannah had explained everything to him, that she did it because she was worried about him. Belatedly, he wondered how much older than Castiel Hannah was.

“You sure?” he pressed, “'Cause you don't look ok.”

“Since when have you been able to tell?” 

Dean blinked at the bark of Cas' words, taking in the wide eyed, angry look and the way his wings flexed and spread away from his body a few inches in the beginnings of an aggressive display. He noted it all before Castiel reigned it all back in and lowered his challenging gaze demurely.

“I'm sorry, I...” the angel trailed off, wings now pulled tight and curled around his shoulders.

It was as if Hannah had removed blinders from his eyes and Dean was able to read Cas so much more accurately. This wasn't Cas just being snippy – had it really ever been? - this was someone that had just realized a threat had noticed that he was wounded. A predator that had just noticed his weak spot, and he was...

Dean felt a cold lump in the back of his throat and something prickle at the corners of his eyes. 

Cas was fucking _scared_. 

Scared of himself. Scared of what he'd only just had occasion to feel for the first time in his very, very long life. Scared of Dean for knowing his weakness.

It was heartbreaking, the vulnerability Dean could see now underneath that angelic mask. The way Cas couldn't quite seem to keep his nerves steady now that he realized that Dean _knew_. The way his wings were shaking a little, the way his dark blue eyes kept lifting like they wanted to meet Dean's but couldn't quite manage it.

Dean licked his lips, struggled to find the right words to balance the situation. He'd never been any good at that.

“Why don't you come back to the fire, Cas? You can try clams for the first time. A la Dean.”

The water was slowly seeping up the legs of Cas' jeans, the denim drawing the water up like a sponge. Cas didn't move, only made another aborted attempt to look Dean in the eye and then half turned like he intended to walk right into the open ocean and hide from his problems with the fish.

“Cas...” Dean sighed, feeling helpless. He couldn't relate to this at all. He didn't know how to help. But he toed off his shoes anyway and pulled off his socks, wincing when he waded out and felt the icy water washing over his skin. 

When he heard the sound of Dean wading through the water, Cas looked up in bemused amusement, his mouth twisting like it wanted to smile when Dean cursed the chill of the water under his breath.

For a second after Dean reached him, the two of them just stared at one another until Cas looked away, out over the open water. Dean wondered again if he could see through the fog. 

“Why did you walk away?” Dean asked softly, wiggling his toes in the loose sand under his feet. 

“I...I needed to...” Cas cleared his throat, tried again. “Hannah was being annoying.”

“That's not what I meant,” Dean had to correct, before Cas could deflect any more. “I mean why did you _walk_? Why not fly?”

Castiel's eyes narrowed and his wings retracted from his shoulders, folding so tight against his back Dean worried they might cramp. 

“What did Hannah say to you?”

“What you probably never would have,” volleyed Dean, keeping his expression as open and neutral as he could in the face of Castiel's suddenly frigid, angelic attitude. 

_No_ , he reminded himself, _not angelic_. What he knew as Castiel's 'angel face' was not angelic at all. It was his warrior face. 

“ _...Castiel, and many others, are finding this sudden calm very disconcerting. For the first time they have nothing to fight. No battle to plan or enemy to kill and with the war in their heads quiet, they're starting to feel dormant instincts._ ”

Castiel's wings inched out and his shoulders tensed.

“Cas, it's _ok_ ,” Dean told him with every ounce of sincerity he had in him

“ _Because they've never had the chance to truly learn what they are, they think these natural thoughts and urges are foreign, instead of the other way around._ ”

“All this stuff you're feeling...it's ok. Do you understand that?” Dean desperately wanted to reach out but with how tense Cas looked it seemed like a bad idea. He'd always been better at comforting with touch rather than with words and his heart ached in his chest when Cas looked at him warily.

"You have no idea what I'm feeling.”

“Maybe not, but what I'm saying is that it's ok _that_ you're feeling.”

It seemed as if he'd found the magic words because Castiel blinked, some of the stiffness easing from his shoulders.

“Hannah keeps saying that,” the angel blurted, as if shocked that she and Dean could both have the same opinion.

“Ok, not sure if the disbelief in your voice is more insulting to me or her but either way…she's right, you know.”

Castiel's head twitched like he'd briefly thought about shaking it in disagreement. “I – she – it's not that easy to...” Cas trailed off with a frustrated sound.

Cas still looked tense, but at least he didn't still have that cornered, wounded animal look to him. So Dean slowly reached out, gave Cas the chance to back away or punch him in the throat, and placed a hand on his shoulder, feeling the soft feathers on the backs of his fingers again.

“Look Cas, I know this is hard for you and I'm not gonna say I wish you had told me because if you don't want to talk to me about this, I totally get it. I can't possibly even begin to understand what you're going through, I...just know that whatever you need, if you ever _do_ want to talk about whatever is going on in that giant brain of yours,” he squeezed Cas' shoulder. “I'm here. Or Sam. Or Hannah. Whoever you're most comfortable with, Cas.” He felt a pang in his chest when he reminded himself that he was probably the one Castiel felt _least_ comfortable with.

Though he supposed he hadn't given Cas much occasion to put his trust in him. Kicking him out when he turned human, nearly beating him to death in the very place he'd been trying to get the angel to call home…among other things.

“And don't, you know, be angry with Hannah, she's just worried about you. She uh, she really cares about you, you know.”

Castiel shifted, his blue eyes stormy, and Dean could hear and feel the water swishing around their legs.

He nodded haltingly, eyes dropping to the water. “I know.”

He let his hand slide over Cas' shoulder, down his arm and grabbed his hand gently. If Cas was going to learn that feeling things like the need to be around others and take comfort in their presence was ok, then Dean was going to have to shirk some of his own reservations about intimacy. And, as he'd told Cas and would tell him as many times he needed to hear it, there was nothing wrong with feeling. Nothing wrong needing people.

Dean wanted Castiel to understand, possibly for the first time ever, that he didn't have to be a perfect, self contained, self-sufficient little soldier. That he had friends, that he was safe and loved and that he was free to do whatever made him happy. Most importantly, that there was nothing wrong with that.

* * *

Back at the fire, Sam and Hannah had peeled some potatoes Dean bought at the market – granting Sam's one request for literally any vegetable he found – and had cut them up into chunks and were frying them in the pan.

They both looked up when Cas and Dean approached and Dean saw Sam eye the shoes he had in his hand. 

“Go for an afternoon swim?” his brother quipped.

“Well someone had to teach the angel what skinny dipping means,” Dean said it without thinking and immediately felt heat punch into his face. Though it was obvious to all of them that neither Cas nor Hannah knew what skinny dipping meant judging by the looks on their faces.

Cas didn't seem to care either way, he simply kept walking, right over to where Hannah was still sitting in the sand, and dropped to the ground beside her without any of his usual grace. It held a note of something like petulance, like a child unhappily admitting they'd been wrong.

Hannah was staring at Castiel with a small frown, waiting to see what he would do.

Cas just sort of...pitched sideways, bumping their bare shoulders together roughly, and Hannah smiled, stretching her wing out to the side to settle over Cas' shoulders just as he let his head fall to rest against hers.

Dean tried not to stare, having never seen them exhibit this particular behaviour yet, but quite sure Cas had just made some kind of apology for storming off and Dean breathed a bit easier. At least he'd managed to help calm things between them.

Until he managed to kick it up again when Hannah found out what had happened between him and Cas. Or did she even really need to know? Cas had seemed so...enthusiastic about it and that was what confused him most. Cas loved Hannah – had said as much himself – so why had he responded with such eagerness when Dean had -

He stopped the train of thought before it started to go in circles and realized he was going to have to talk to Sam about this because this kind of drama was way out of his skill range.

But first they were going to eat because he was god damn starving.

The food turned out pretty damn good, for the fact they were using a rock for a stove, and both Dean and Sam had scarfed theirs down before either of the angels had had a second clam.

They'd both watched the brothers first, watched how they opened the clams and removed them from the half shell before pinching the dark part at one end and shucking it off before putting the whole thing in their mouth. Then they had mimicked them exactly and it was the most endearing thing about the two of them sometimes.

The brothers shared a grin. It wasn't the first time they'd shown the angels something new and had been impromptu teachers. After the first time they'd noticed it, they had both been more conscious of what they did when introducing Cas and Hannah to something new, because whatever they saw the brothers do, they copied exactly.

It was a strange and oddly wonderful feeling, to know that he was showing something new to two creatures that had been around since the birth of the planet. Not to mention it was a bit strange to have two people like Cas and Hannah, with their vast knowledge and incomprehensible consciousness', looking to him for guidance in something as simple as how to properly eat shell fish.

Angels, they'd learned, were picky eaters. Some things they didn't mind. The simpler the better, molecule-wise. Dean was starting to figure out they liked natural things. Like raw vegetables and fruits or fresh meat and seafood with no or very little seasoning. He'd also learned that, like sleeping, just because they didn't _need_ to didn't mean they couldn't or that it wasn't beneficial. 

Chewing absently on a soft chunk of potato, Dean watched the two angels fondly.

Hannah was chewing thoughtfully on her second clam, her eyes scrunched in thought. Cas was smushing a piece of potato between his thumb and index finger with a curious expression on his face. Hannah still had one wing resting over Cas' shoulders like she'd forgotten it was there, and the two of them had a flimsy paper plate balanced on their knee.

Another thing he'd learned: some angels were kind of adorable. All that power and knowledge, stumped by such simple human oddities.

Hannah mumbled something around her mouth full of food and it made Cas look away from the potato mush between his fingers, a smile teasing his lips at whatever Hannah had said. He looked back down and delicately stuck one finger after another into his mouth, liking off the mess. The next chunk of potato he picked up, he just popped in his mouth, curiosity apparently satisfied now that he'd practically deconstructed one.

The space around them was starting to get dark by the time the two angels _finally_ finished their food. By then, Sam and Dean were both three beers deep and feeling a buzz. If it was possible, the fog seemed to have gotten thicker as night – and the temperature – descended. 

Both Hannah and Cas' wings had gotten fluffy, all the feathers puffing up like Dean had seen birds do when sleepy or cold, and they had both curled their wings around their shoulders and shuffled closer to the fire.

“You guys gonna be ok tonight?” Dean asked, having not even thought about the fact that the angels didn't have any blankets of their own. He had three on his own bed though, and could give one each to them.

“I don't think we will sleep tonight,” answered Hannah, tossing her paper plate into the fire just like Sam and Dean had.

Cas was methodically tearing his into tiny pieces as he gazed into the flames, nodding absently to show he agreed what Hannah had said.

“A few miles East of here, over the water, the sky is clear.” She budged Cas with her elbow and he blinked, looking over at her with a vaguely interested expression. “What say you to a midnight flight over the sea.”

One corner of Cas' mouth curled up and he huffed a laugh through his nose, eyes closing briefly. There was obviously another layer to Hannah's question, hinting at a story or experience only the two of then shared.

“Yes, alright,” Cas sighed, huffing another laugh and looking off in the direction of the water.

Dean desperately wanted to ask what the story behind it was, he always did when the two angels shared an inside joke or story, but he had some shit to work out and some sleep to get. So he flipped the flat rock out of the fire, chuckling when it sizzled loudly on the damp sand and made Castiel jump.

Hannah and Cas stood when the brothers did, reaching their arms over their hands and fanning out their wings, lifting and flexing in lazy beats that made the dense mist around them swirl in giant vortexes.

Dean hung around on the little deck to watch the angel's take flight. He'd never get tired of watching Cas fly.

He glanced at the fire pit, making sure it was still burning strong. Sam had gone to kick sand over it but Castiel had stopped him, asked if they could keep it burning for when they returned. 

“We could find our way back without it, of course. But the light source helps,” he'd told them.

So they'd stoked it high enough to officially call it a bonfire, flames licking high into the air and pushing back against the dark and the fog, and Dean had followed Sam into the cabin with images in his head of Castiel soaring high above the massive waves of the open ocean, miles and miles off the coastal shore where Sam and Dean were sleeping, the tiny fire a pinprick in his angelic sight. A constant beacon marking home.

The waves lapping at the sand, drawing closer as the tide came in, and the crackle and pop of the fire were the only sounds outside the rustling and shuffling of thick blankets as the brothers arrange their beds to their liking. 

The more Dean thought about the incident with Cas – because he was trying to be honest these days and that included with himself – the more he realized he needed some advice on how to clean up the mess that he – ok, he _and_ Cas – had made. But for some reason Cas didn't seem all that worried about it, which, for some reason, only made Dean feel like this was more his fault than the angel's. After all, Cas was kind of oblivious when it came to social norms and expectations. Though, he wasn't so naive that he'd think a kiss – and certainly not a kiss like _that_ – was something two people who were just friends shared.

“Uh, so listen...”

 _Yes, excellent start_ , _Winchester_ , Dean told himself. He sighed sharply through his nose, already able to feel Sam's concerned gaze on the back of his head.

“What's wrong?” Sam's voice was grave, as if he was expecting Dean to tell him the second apocalypse was coming in the morning.

So he turned, “Alright, chill out, it's not the end of the world.” He was relieved to see Sam's shoulders relax instantly. “I just...kind of need some advice.”

Sam's eyes narrowed with the kind of suspicion only a little brother could have. “About what?”

“I uh...I kinda did something stupid. Like really, _really_ stupid.”

It was obvious when Sam's eyes shifted sideways that he was rolling through all the stupid things Dean had a proclivity for repeating.

“It's not – I mean I've never...” he trailed off with a frustrated grunt, noticing that Sam was back to looking concerned again. So he squared his shoulders and told himself to suck it the fuck up because he'd shot the Devil in the face, he could god damn well tell his brother he might have broken someone else' relationship.

“I...kissed Cas.”

Sam's face went slack and he dropped heavily onto the wooden bench. Whatever he'd been expecting Dean to say, that obviously hadn't been it.

“You...you...Cas,” Sam struggled. “You _kissed_...Castiel.”

“Yeah,” Dean confirmed, sitting down on his own bench. “And uh...I'm not sure how to fix it.”

Sam blinked. “Fix…it?”

With a dramatic sigh, Dean swung his legs up and laid down on the thick blankets. “Yeah, I mean I need to fix this shit! What about Hannah? Her and Cas are...you know, and I just went and – and it wasn't just _me_ , you know, Cas kissed me _back_ and he was like... _enthusiastic_ , if you know what I mean. What _does_ that mean, then?” God now he couldn't seem to shut the hell up. “He probably just doesn't understand or...or...”

But that was bullshit and Dean knew it. Cas wasn't _that_ naive.

He huffed another sigh and rolled his head to look at his brother but Sam's expression still lacked comprehension. 

“Hannah,” Sam repeated at length, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

“What part of this are you struggling with?” Dean snapped. Why didn't Sam sense the urgency here?

A few seconds later and Sam merely huffed a laugh and wiped the pads of his fingers over his lips, then fixed Dean with the look he usually gave when he thought Dean was being particularly dense.

“Dude, Cas and Hanah arenn't -”

“Don't look at me like that!” Dean snapped. He wasn't stupid, thank you very much, and he hated it when people looked at him like he was. “I gotta fix this, man, I can't...and Cas is so happy, I don't want to...” he trailed off again, the words he needed refusing to come to mind. Instead, he sighed miserably up at the pointed ceiling of the cabin.

 _You might not be stupid, but you're one hell of a fuck up_ , he scolded himself.

“Dean,” Sam said, with forced patience lacing his voice. “What makes you think Cas and Hannah are together?”

So shocked was he by the stupidity of the question, Dean actually had to sit up to stare at his brother. 

“What the hell are you even talking about? You go blind?” He started ticking his fingers off, “They _sleep_ together, they _cuddle in front of the fire_ , they bicker like a married couple-”

Sam spoke over him with confidence. “Dean they sleep together, but it's just sleeping. They _nest_ together. Angels _do_ that. We could have ten angels living with us and they'd all cram themselves into one nest, it's what they do. They're – ok don't think of them as birds 'cause it pisses them off – but, just this once to get your dumbass head around it.” Sam shifted into professor mode and Dean tried to look annoyed, but secretly was hanging off every word. “Think of angels like birds. They're creatures of flight and can you think of a species of bird that doesn't have a flock? Angels are one big family...kind of. But they have smaller groups that kind of congregate together. Cas and Hannah aren't sleeping together how you think. They're just sleeping _close_ to each other. It's a safety thing, knowing one of their own is close by in case shit hits the fan. They're pack animals -”

“Man, don't call Cas an animal.”

“You know what I mean,” Sam said, looking annoyed. “Angels want to be around other angels just as much as humans want to be around other humans. _We're_ pack animals too.”

Dean thought this over, trying, as he had been for the last couple months, to realign his view of angels.

“But, they always seemed to work alone. Angels, I mean. Cas was never...” but he stopped there, Hannah's words coming back to him.

“ _...they're starting to feel dormant instincts. Because they've never had the chance to truly learn what they are, they think these natural thoughts and urges are foreign, instead of the other way around._ ”

“They're not like us, Dean,” Sam said gently. “ _Cas_ , isn't like us. He thinks differently than we do. He sees things differently than we do. He has instincts that we don't, that we can't really understand. Just because they're sleeping with each other doesn't mean they're having sex.”

Dean winced, uncomfortable even with the idea of it.

“Cas and Hannah are _friends_. Really, good, old, war buddies. That's honestly it, Dean.”

“How do you know?” he quickly asked. “How do you know so much about any of this?”

Sam scoffed. “Because I _ask_ about it. I _talk_ to Cas and Hannah about it all. I ask how they're doing and what they're having trouble with or if they need help. And the strangest thing happens when you ask people about themselves, they _answer_ , Dean.”

“Alright, cool it with the condescending tone, sasquatch.”

“I'm serious. You think Cas is this closed book but have you ever just sat down and asked him a question? Have you ever just been like, 'Hey, Cas, what's with the pile of blankets in the sitting room.' or 'Hey, Hannah, why are you and Cas sleeping in the same bed – nest, whatever – together?' or 'Hey, Cas, you obviously love flying, why have I never seen you do it before?'. It's not that hard, Dean.”

Dean stared, feeling both embarrassed and angry because it was fucking hard for _him_. “Just because you find something easy doesn't mean everyone does,” he said, trying to keep the anger from his voice, because he didn't want this to turn into an argument. “You think I never wondered about all that? You think I didn't want to ask those questions, or that I was just too self absorbed to even think about it?”

Sam licked his lips, looking away. 

“You've always been able to talk to people, Sam, it's always been easy for you. Why do you think I always let you take the lead questioning witnesses? You can talk to people and more importantly, people are comfortable talking _to_ you. Not the case for me.”

Sam bowed his head to run his fingers through his hair. “I...I'm sorry. I know, I just thought that with Cas it might be different.”

“Why would it be different?”

“Because it's Cas,” Sam scoffed, like it was obvious, like he thought Dean was being deliberately difficult now. “It's _Cas_. He's like the easiest person to talk to ever. He doesn't play games or even know how to give cryptic answers. You ask him a question and he either answers it or tells you to get lost.” Sam shrugged. “Most of the time he actually seems eager to talk, on the rare occasion someone asks him to. I've been trying to make a point of it more, actually. To talk to him, I mean. I had my suspicions that he was struggling with something. I didn't know what it was though. I've asked if he wants to talk about it a few times but he always shuts me down.”

Sam sighed and Dean leaned back, his hands clutching his thighs. Was he literally the only one who hadn't realized Cas was suffering? That the angel was actually the opposite of happier than he'd ever been? 

“Jesus, I'm so bad at this shit,” he muttered.

“What do you mean?”

“I thought – I thought Cas was finally starting to be happy! He seemed like he was finally relaxing! He's been more _himself_ than I've ever seen him. Cuddling up with another angel, flying for hours a day – for fuck's sake his eyes are _literally_ glowing half the time! I thought...” he let his hands fall from where they had been gesticulating, palms slapping against his thighs. “I dunno, I thought for once he was actually...” his trailed off, head falling back against the wall with a soft _thunk_ and a heavy ball of misery dropping into his stomach with the same feeling.

Why did he always seem to be behind everyone else when it came to stuff like this? Why did he fail so hard at reading people? He wasn't stupid.

“Cas _is_ happier, Dean,” Sam said slowly, cautiously, like he was still deciding how to say what he wanted. “But he's not at the same time. It didn't make sense until Hannah spelled it out for us, though. He's happy but he feels guilty about it and after everything she told us about what angels went through...it makes sense. It's really – it's tragic, man. I had no idea that's why angels are the way they are.”

Sam sighed sharply through his nose. “He's so good at keeping things hidden, like I knew there was something going on but,” he shook his head, spreading his arms a little, palms out, before clasping his hands again with an air of moving on. “But now we know, right? We can help him understand that there's nothing wrong with letting go, having fun, being himself or whatever.”

Dean felt the hostility seep from him and he pushed the rest of it away with a breath from his lungs. 

“And about the whole Cas/Hannah thing...Dean you didn't ruin anything. You need to – and I really can't stress this enough – you _really_ need to get over this not being able to talk thing because you need to talk to Cas about whatever happened between you two,” Sam explained. “Don't let it go too long, Cas is probably already confused enough about it as it is. What did you do after, by the way?” There was a pre-emptive grimace on Sam's face already.

Dean winced, thinking of how he'd cursed and swore and desperately tried to backpedal. Said something about Hannah and how Castiel's expression had closed over before he told Dean to go back to the fire.

Sam sighed. “Yeah, that's what I thought. In the morning, you guys go for a walk and sort this shit out because oh my god _finally._ ” At that, Sam threw himself back onto his bench and pulled a few of the blankets over his legs.

Now that he had a plan, now that he had hope of maybe starting this thing with Cas that had been hanging between them for years, now that he finally seemed to have found the courage to do something about it, Dean didn't want to wait till morning. He was buzzing with giddy anticipation. He wanted to find Cas _now_ , tell him how he felt _now_ , kiss him senseless _now_.

But the angel was somewhere a few miles up over the water and a few more miles out from the coast, flying. Indulging in his flighty urges and having fun. The thought made Dean smile, made the urgency in his chest fade a bit. He could wait.

Dawn came slowly, the dark and the fog both dissipating with all the speed of a receding glacier. Dean was awake to watch it go. 

He'd woken up early enough that the sun had not yet risen and had tasked himself with stoking the nearly dead fire again, till the flames were to the height of his chest, then stood back with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket while he waited for day to break.

The sun rose before he could see it, and made quick work of the fog as it went. By six o'clock, the fog was gone, as if it had never been, and the pinkish-grey light of dawn seeped into the sky over the water.

Absently, he wondered if he could salvage some kind of breakfast from whatever was left over from the night before. There was bread and some potatoes and butter left, but they'd devoured all the clams. 

The thought was pushed from his head when he glanced up at the blazing sliver of sun just peeking over the water and saw two black specs silhouetted against the pink sky.

All that jittery eagerness returned full force and Dean watched the two angels approach. He glanced around as a second thought, wondering if there was anyone around that might see. When they'd come to the beach the day before the fog had been so thick he couldn't see if there were any houses or buildings nearby. Though looking now he realized they had nothing to worry about. There wasn't a sign of human life for as far as he could see either direction down the coast and it was still spring and not even warm enough for him to go without a jacket. He glanced back in the direction of the road but it was far enough away that he wasn't too concerned about someone noticing the angels.

His mouth twisted down with a niggling of worry, trying to make a plan should the need arise. Smashing any phones or cameras and threats would probably work. They usually did.

Cas and Hannah were close enough now that he could just distinguish their wings, rising and falling in slow but powerful beats that he knew were propelling them even faster than the impala could drive on an open highway.

A few seconds later and Dean could tell one from the other. Hannah was flying a few feet higher, her wings beating less frequently, evidently riding an updraft, looking all the world as if she could coast like that all the way to Europe.

Cas, one the other hand, spotted a seagull nearby and suddenly snapped his wings out rigid and rolled to the left, slipping sideways like a banking fighter jet.

The seagull zigged and zagged in panic, probably certain of it's imminent demise even though Cas was perfectly harmless. Then it dove towards the water and Cas followed, his wings tucking tight against his back, dropping like a stone towards the water. At the last second, his wings snapped out again, catching the air like great sails, and he skimmed the top of the water, before giving one solid downbeat and abruptly banking when the seagull did, following it into a sharp turn and then back up into the air.

Dean felt his gut swoop with every sharp movement, blown away by the agility Cas displayed. It was quite easy then, to picture Cas decked out in heavenly armor, wielding a blazing angelic sword, leading his garrison into battle.

If Cas was just having fun now, he must have been absolutely lethal on the battle field.

He made a note to ask later.

Cas eventually left the seagull alone and stayed close to the water, drifting closer to Hannah as she kept steady on her course for the shore line. Cas kept veering from side to side, breaking away from her to fly perpendicular to her path before coming back, as if he wasn't quite ready to stop flying yet even though they'd been at it for nearly eight hours.

Hannah touched down first, her dove grey wings fanning out while her lower body swung forward. Breaking with quick, shallow wing beats until her feet were on the ground and she sighed with a wide smile. For a moment, her wings stayed arched and open and she reached her arms over her shoulders with a groan, rising up on her toes, wing tips reaching in opposite directions.

“Good flight?” Dean asked.

She hummed her assent, all her limbs pulling back, wings folded loose and happy, as she turned to watch Castiel finally head for the shore. 

His landing was a whirlwind, eyes and wings equally as wild and alive with overflowing energy, and Dean wondered how the hell he could literally be buzzing with energy after eight solid hours of flying without interruption.

Cas' wingbeats remained wide and slow, unlike Hannah's quick controlled ones, and he kicked up the sand like a helicopter would. Still, despite the mess, his landing was much more delicate and controlled than Hannah's was, in the sense that he let one foot ease onto the ground and then the other, rolling on the balls of his feet and letting his body weight sink rather than drop. His wings stayed open too after he'd stepped onto the sand, stretching with a groan just like Hannah had.

Normally, this is the point where the two of them would curl up in the nest of blankets in front of the fire place and sleep for a few hours but neither of them looked particularly tired.

The glow in Hannah's eyes was still lingering but Castiel's were glowing bright and blue an he was already looking out over the water again like he'd take flight immediately for another eight hours.

“Old habits die hard, isn't that what the humans say?” Hannah was smirking, Dean noticed, as she asked Castiel the question.

He turned his glowing eyes on her, his confusion showing through the shine of them. But then his expression slacked with understanding and the set of his mouth was the only thing that told Dean he'd probably just rolled his eyes.

“Such talk is unbecoming of you, _soldier,_ ” Castiel quipped.

“Are you two ever not bickering?” Dean threw in, because it seemed like they weren't. If it wasn't for the hidden smiles behind their eyes, he might have thought they hated each other.

“Bickering implies room for argument,” Hannah answered cryptically. “There is no room for argument in _that_ landing.” Her eyebrows climbed a little higher as Castiel folded his arms over his chest and stared at her. “Such flourish,” she cajoled. “Such flare.” Her eyes slid sideways to Dean, “Commanders have a reputation for being a bit...dramatic.”

“Yeah, Cas is quite the drama queen,” Dean deadpanned. Because if there was anyone less dramatic than Cas, he'd yet to meet them. Although, he was starting to realize angels displayed a very subtle body language that he was only just starting to be able to read and what seemed like a breath up from straight faced stoicism would, to another angel, read as absolute peacocking.

He watched Cas ruffle his feathers a little before he finally cleared his throat and got to the task at hand. Cas wasn't acting outwardly hostile towards him but he'd only glanced in Dean's direction since landing and the longing with which he was staring out over the water meant he had places he'd much rather be, and Dean couldn't help but think what had happened the night before had something to do with it. Cas loved to fly, but he'd always seemed equally happy to get back and spend time in the bunker with the brothers.

“Cas,” he said, taking a few steps closer.

Castiel eyed him warily through the dimming glow in his eyes.

“Can we, uh...talk?”

In his peripheral vision, Hannah made some kind of jerking motion with one of her wings and it drew Castiel's attention, his head snapping over to her, his body a rigid line of innate militant authority.

“I'll just go help Sam with breakfast, shall I?” Hannah suggested, turning towards the cabins where the fire was still roaring high.

Her back was to them and she flicked her left wing out a few inches, but it settled again almost immediately. Dean would have thought nothing of it if he hadn't heard Cas huff an exasperated sigh.

He had so much to learn.

“Talk about what?” Castiel bluntly asked him, his face unreadable. His wings were tight against his back again, which meant the inscrutable body language was completely intentional; he intended to give nothing away to Dean at all and Dean supposed he had that coming.

Knowing that Cas appreciated directness, Dean decided to try his hand at being just as blunt as the angel. His gut squirmed with the decision but he asked himself what was the worst thing that could happen? In this, he _needed_ to be blunt. He needed Castiel to understand him perfectly. There could be no room for error here, and he didn't want to leave the angel to try and pick up on his awkward in-between words. That wasn't fair.

“About the fact that we kissed yesterday.”

Castiel's chin lifted almost imperceptibly but Dean was fluent enough in _Cas_ to know that meant he'd taken the angel by surprise.

A moment of silence stretched between them and for once Dean just let it, watching Cas watch him as the light faded from his eyes and he could look into those stormy blues once more. 

“ _You_ kissed _me_ ,” Cas suddenly said, his voice perfectly controlled in the most infuriating way.

“You kissed me back,” Dean volleyed.

The most peculiar thing happened then. All the little tiny feathers along the leading edges of Cas' wings rose up, like how a person’s hair stands on end when they get goosebumps, and Dean was caught halfway between wanting to smile and wanting keep his face perfectly straight. He didn't know what that reaction meant, but if he had to guess, it was either embarrassment or Castiel felt threatened.

After a moment, the feathers settled and Castiel was the first one to break eye contact. 

“Seemed rude not to,” Cas muttered at length, staring just over Dean’s shoulder.

They were dancing again, like they always did. Despite Dean's desire to be direct it seemed Castiel had developed his own habits when speaking with Dean about anything emotional. He mentally slapped himself, redoubling his efforts; it seemed as if he had his own conditioning to un-teach Cas.

“I didn't mind, for the record,” he tried again, taking a slow step closer.

Castiel stiffened imperceptibly, his gaze snapping down to the ground as if noting the distance between them and Dean was dismayed to notice Cas' toes twitch in the sand, as if he wanted to take a step back.

“I, uh...I've kinda wanted to do that for a while.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and fixed Cas with a soft look, rolling his bottom lip between his teeth. “Kinda wanna do it again.”

The feathers all down the sides of Cas' wings lifted then, as well as the little ones along the leading edge, and this time Dean did smile. The fluffing feathers, coupled with the way Cas' lips parted and his eyes got a little wide suddenly brought it into focus and Dean realized what the rising feathers meant. 

Bashfulness. Cas was fucking _blushing_ with his wings and it was the most delightful thing Dean had ever seen.

“What about Hannah?” Castiel suddenly asked, some of the feathers flattening like he was making a conscious effort to mask his blush. He was only partially successful.

At the question, it was Dean's turn to blush and he had to looked away, huffed an embarrassed little laugh. 

“Uh, yeah. I thought that you and Hannah were, you know, _together_. And I kind of freaked out 'cause I thought I'd just fucked it up for both of you by...and I was so mad at myself because you seemed so happy with her and I thought I ruined it...”

He was doing good, he thought, with the 'being direct' thing. It was easier than he thought it would be. But then he looked back up at Cas and saw incomprehension written all over the angel's face.

“You thought Hannah and I – why does everyone always assume that?” Cas snapped with exasperation.

There were a lot of stories behind that tone of voice but Dean didn't care about that right now. He opened his mouth but Cas wasn't done being annoyed with the assumption.

“Hannah and I are _just friends,_ ” he said firmly, seemingly addressing not only Dean but the entirety of the universe as if to set the record straight once and for all.

“That's good,” Dean interrupted before he could stop himself. “And not just because it means I didn't fuck up a relationship for you. But, I gotta ask. Why did you kiss me back?”

His stomach churned sickeningly because he might have gotten one burden off his shoulders but Castiel had yet to be as direct with him. It didn't bode well when all of Cas' feathers flattened back down tight right away and he drew a breath.

Another silence swelled between them and Cas wasn't even blinking anymore, his entire body wound tight as a drum. 

“Because I –” Cas blinked then, like he hadn't meant to speak, like it had burst out of him.

And then Dean saw the panic start to set in and he couldn't believe that he was turning out to be the calm one in this situation. From memory, Hannah's words came to him again.

“ _Castiel is struggling to accept that angels were made to feel things...but they've never felt it before – they didn't know how – and now it's being forced onto them just like the blades had been forced into their hands and what should be natural is now frightening to them._ ”

“Cas, whatever you're feeling…it's ok.” Dean had his hands up in a sign of peace, staying put even though he desperately wanted to move closer. “Just...just talk to me. What's going on in that head of yours?”

Cas licked his lips, eyes darting over Dean's shoulder like he was looking for an escape route.

Dean hadn't expected this. Castiel always seemed so composed, so untouchable. But it seemed that now he had been confronted directly, that there was nowhere for him to hide, Cas was panicking. He was scared and Dean felt sick because he didn't know how to fix it. Didn't even know what it all meant.

“Cas, it's _ok_ -”

“No it's _not_!”

Dean jumped at the volume of Castiel's voice and the anguish he could hear within it. A damn had burst and he braced himself for the onslaught.

“It's _not_ ok Dean, all these _feelings,_ ” he spat, “the _intensity_ of them, the _frequency_ of them! How much I want to –” he cut himself off, a growl of frustration in the back of his throat.

But Dean came forward then, grabbed both the angel's shoulders. “Keep talking, Cas, explain it to me.”

Cas stared at him with turmoil in his blue eyes, looking sad, looking _ashamed_ , and it made Dean's heart ache. He didn't think it would ever stop feeling like a punch to the gut whenever he was presented with how fucked up angels were.

“The way I feel about you,” Cas finally continued with resignation. In his mind, he was confessing a sin, Dean realized. “It's not...”

“It's not _what_ , Cas?” Dean gently urged him.

He thought he might know what was going on. Hannah had told them she had been trying to get Cas to realized that angels _had_ been created with the ability to feel. That once upon a time it was natural for them to. But a few hundred million years of knowing the exact opposite was probably warring for validity in Castiel's mind. He was trying to reconcile what Hannah had told him was true with what he'd known all his life and the two concepts weren't meshing at all.

“I know you're having a hard time with this,” Dean said, letting one hand leave Cas' shoulder to settle on the side of his neck. “And I can't even begin to understand what your going through. But Hannah told us some stuff last night and it...I think I'm starting to understand a little better. But you gotta be straight with me, Cas. With _this_ you gotta be straight with me because I don't want either of us to be left guessing what the other is thinking.” He let his other hand settled on the side of Cas' neck too, let his thumbs brush over the angel's sharp cheekbones, stared earnestly into his wide blue eyes. “The way you feel about me isn't _what_ , Cas?”

Cas' lips curled and his head tilted fondly. “It's not...it feels...”

Dean grinned, thinking he might finally understand. “Scary?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Castiel breathed. “Yes, it's _terrifying_ how badly I want to be around you all the time; how I can't think straight when you look me in the eye or how ridiculously lovely you look in those ripped up jeans you wear on laundry day-”

Dean leaned down and pressed their lips together fiercely, his heart soaring.

Cas kissed him back with all the pent-up ferocity of a building storm, his hands reaching up and grabbing at Dean's jacket, tugging him closer.

Cas kissed like he flew; with a wildness and appreciation that suggested he'd been aching to do so for centuries, and Dean let his hand tangle in the angel's hair, let his other slip around to press against the dip in his spine to push them flush together from chest to hips.

He pushed his hand slowly up Cas' back, carefully feeling along the space between his wings, and when his fingers brushed the base of the left one, Castiel gasped and Dean dipped his tongue inside once, tasting rainwater and clean sea air before pulling back to stare in to Cas' dazed eyes.

“This ok?” he panted as he curled just the tips of his fingers into the soft feathers of the angel's wing-base.

Castiel's brow scrunched adorably and his mouth dropped around another gasp, his eyes half-closing with whatever sensation Dean's fingers were giving him. The sight of it had heat pooling low in Dean's stomach and he wiggled his fingers a little, watching with rapt attention the way Castiel's face scrunched up again, how his long fingers clutched convulsively at Dean's jacket, how he arched his whole body towards Dean.

It was intoxicating, these reactions, and Dean was hungry for more.

“Cas?”

Cas' eyes opened slowly, his pupils were blown wide already and Dean's mouth suddenly went dry. 

“You wanna take a walk?” Dean suggested.

A touch of awareness flickered back into Castiel's eyes. “A walk?”

“Yeah, like maybe over that way, away from...” Dean jerked his head in the direction of the cabins and Castiel's eyes went wide with understanding. 

“Oh, a walk.” He pulled back a little, rolling his shoulders and desperately trying to regain his composure. “Yes, let's.”

They made it as far as Castiel's offhand comment that he could no longer see the cabins before Dean took that as his cue to get things back on track and wrapped his arms back around the angel, muffled a laugh into the side of his neck when Castiel arched his wings out to either side.

“Have I ever told you how beautiful your wings are?” Dean said, pulling his face away from Cas' neck just enough to press a kiss to the angel's temple.

He felt Cas huff a laugh into his shoulder. “No, you haven't.”

“You're wings are beautiful, Cas,” Dean whispered, his lips brushing Castiel's ear. “Wild just like the rest of you and soft just like your eyes and with those long, sleek, flight-feathers that turn gold in the sun; gold just like your heart.” He swallowed around the truth of what he said and the emotion it pulled up his throat. “They're beautiful just like everything about you.”

Castiel's fingers were digging into him hard, one hand hooked around the back of his shoulder and the other arm curled around his ribs, and his breathing was a ragged.

Dean decided this straight talking thing was going to stay.

Castiel pulled back, biting his bottom lip through a smile and looking shyly up at Dean through his eyelashes in a way that had Dean torn between the heart melting _innocence_ of it and the sudden desire to thrown the angel down and ravish him.

He understood what Cas meant when he said he was scared of what he felt for Dean – of the intensity of it – because it was only now that he was truly realizing, as he looked down into Cas' big, blue, doe eyes, just how deeply in love he was. In their life, feelings that deep were dangerous. The fall of one of them meant the ruin of the other. And one of them would fall eventually.

But Dean didn't care. They'd been fighting all their lives and now it was time to have some good. And he'd show Cas just how _great_ good things can be.

As it turned out, Cas had similar ideas, and not long after Dean found himself laying back on the loose sand with a lap full of angel.

Cas' wings were just as animated as he was, rising and falling with lazy, almost absent beats, like breaths or a heartbeat, but Dean found he could break their rhythm if he tried. Gently digging his fingers into the base of Cas' wings would make them freeze, just for a second. Slipping his fingers between the longer feathers higher up would make Cas push his wings down into his hands. And dragging his hand against the grain of the feathers would make all of Cas shake.

He didn't hold back letting his hands wander, but Dean did stay aware of the fact that this was all new territory to the angel. He kept his movements slow and gentle, let touches in new places linger to give Cas a chance to tell him no.

Cas' hands explored him in return, his touch delicate with the barest hint of hesitance in his movements that melted Dean's heart.

Lips on his neck, nibbling at his collar bone, while soft hands pushed up under his shirt, skirted around a nipple, thighs squeezing his hips, breath ghosting over his skin, Dean felt like he was adrift in the very ocean waters he could hear lapping at the shore.

He tired to regain some ground, let his hands drift from where they had been playing at the base of Cas' powerful wings to tighten around his narrow hips, the pads of his thumbs rubbing over sharp hipbones.

The bulge in each of their pants was obvious and Dean slowly, deliberately, pushed down on Cas' hips at the same time he ground his own up, and was rewarded with a delicious drag of slow friction that pulled a groan from deep in Cas' chest and a ripple through his wings.

He did it again with a bit more force this time and it had Castiel rearing up and turning his face skyward, palms bracing against Dean's chest and wings fanning out wide to either side. All the long flight feathers at the tips spread, making the very ends look serrated and dangerous.

Dean's breath caught in his throat at the display, squeezing Cas' hips tighter and rocking their hips together again and again. 

“ _Dean_ ,” Cas breathed his name like a prayer, finally looking back down with grace-blown eyes. His lips were swollen and red and his cheeks were a delicate pink. Against Dean's chest, his hands trembled. At his back, his wings shuddered and flexed.

“You ok?” Dean asked, just to be sure. He got a breathless nod in response, blue light shining brightly through hooded eyes, so he moved one hand around to the front of Cas' jeans, dragging his hand across the hard bulge there in question.

But Cas merely bit at his already swollen lips, rocking in Dean's lap again and Dean was momentarily distracted, hissing with the sharp stab of heat lancing through him with every movement Cas made against him.

A few minutes – and a lot of denim on denim friction – later and Dean managed to wrangled his waning focus and slip the tips of his fingers past the waistband of Cas' jeans. He swallowed, able to feel the flex of Castiel's abdominal muscles, his skin inhumanly warm against the back of his fingers.

“More?” he asked – well, panted. 

Cas looked down at him, the light dimming with the return of his awareness. 

He didn't understand, Dean realized. He didn't understand what Dean was asking him. 

More what? He might as well have said.

Dean popped the button on Cas' jeans and watched the angel's eyes widen. Before Dean could pull his hand away and put it somewhere safer, Cas gave a tiny nod. 

“More.”

Still, Dean moved slowly, watching the light flare behind Cas' eyes again, keeping a close eye on what his wings were saying, making sure the little crumple between his eyebrows and the 'O' of his open mouth was from pleasure and nothing else.

When he could finally circle his hand around both their cocks, Cas jerked in his lap, eyes flying open, and Dean eased his grip immediately, his whole body quivering with heat and restraint.

"Hey, it's ok,” he reassured the angel. “It's gonna feel pretty intense,” he squeezed gently around their heads and cut off the groan before it left his throat.

Above him, Cas whimpered, his hips twitching back and forward, thrusting in what was purely a instinctual move of his human body and Dean saw the freak-out before it happened, releasing them both when the blue light in Cas' eyes flickered.

“Easy, Cas.” He settled both his hands on Cas' thighs and kept them there, willing his heart to stop pounding blood into his cock long enough to calm Cas down. “Hey,” he squeezed the solid muscle in the angel's thigh. Cas' eyes focused on him, “You're alright, Cas, just breathe.”

Dealing with his own suppressed instincts was already frightening for him; throw in a sudden burst of involuntary thoughts and movements from his vessel and Dean was pretty sure they were on the verge of a serious setback.

But Cas was already loosening up, his body going soft and wings folding in a little.

He reached up to drag his fingers down the inside of Cas' wing, feeling him relax even more.

“That's good, Cas,” he softly praised. With his other hand, he rubbed Cas' thigh, dragging his thumb up the inside and feeling Cas shudder. “Nothing to worry about.”

Castiel smiled uncertainly right before he rolled his hips experimentally, rubbing their cocks together.

Dean couldn't stop the groan this time, rocking his hips into Cas'. He refrained from touching again, let his hands wander up into Cas' wings once more, and let the angel set the pace.

Spikes of heat raced up through Dean's body with every little movement and sound Cas made, arcing down his limbs like electricity every time their cocks slid together. Dean wished he had more eyes to watch Cas with. He wished he could keep a constant watch on the way Cas' wings and feathers moved, rippling like the ocean waters behind them. He wanted to always be looking at Cas' face, watching his mouth form around each little whimper and growl and gasp. Desperately needed to be able to keep his eyes on the fluid way the angel's hips rolled in his lap, rubbing their cocks together smoothly.

Heat pooled low in Dean's stomach and he tilted his head back, curling his fingers deep in the soft feathers under his hands, heels digging into the sand.

“Cas – _fuck_ ,” he growled, settling his hands on Cas' hips again, pushing him down harder. Cas' hands settled over his, trembled when they slid down over his wrist and grabbed them. Dean opened his eyes.

Cas' eyes were closed, his mouth open, cheeks flushed, but his brow was crumpling into something more worried than Dean would like to see and Cas' hands were shaking now where they circled his wrists. 

“You're doing so good, angel,” he praised softly. He rubbed his thumbs over Cas' hipbones while they continued to rock together. “You're almost there aren't you? You can feel it building right,” he pressed his hand low against Cas' belly, right above his straining cock, “Here.”

The scrunch between Castiel's brows eased back a little.

Dean curled his fingers around the faint indent of Cas' waist, pulled a little to bow his spine and change the angle of his hips and earned a whimper from the angel. Cas' knees slid out a few inches along the sand, another instinct telling him to spread his legs to bring them closer together, and Dean nearly came from the sight alone.

Cas leaned forward, his hands digging into the sand on either side of Dean's head, grinding down with the newfound leverage and it was only seconds later that Dean felt his orgasm building low in his gut.

He clenched his teeth, dug his fingers into the meaty part of Cas' hips and felt Cas' rhythmic rocking stutter.

“ _Fuck, Cas -_ ”

“ _Dean_.”

He forced himself to keep his eyes open, watched how the blue glow was seeping out from under Castiel's closed eyes, and felt his orgasm getting ready to crash over him, thought of how Cas probably felt like he was standing on the edge of a cliff.

“Let go, Cas. Let go, I got you...”

Cas' wings suddenly spread wide and arched high and he came hard with a howl that sounded more like it was in the wind around them than from his mouth. Dean went tumbling after him seconds later, digging his fingers into Cas hard enough to bruise and riding the waves of his orgasm with a low growl curling around his throat.

The first thing that managed to filter through the haze in Dean's brain was the soft thud of Cas' wings bracing against the sand, apparently spent enough that he no longer wished to hold them up. Absently, Dean pried his hands off Cas' hips and stroked the backs of his knuckles down the inside of each wing, grinning when he felt Cas shiver against him.

“So sensitive,” he murmured into Cas' hair. The angel had collapsed forward a few seconds later, burying his face in the side of Dean's neck.

Cas hummed but didn't move, his wings like fluffy, warm walls on either side of them. 

He felt light and giddy and he pressed more kisses to Cas' temple until the angel giggled – _giggled_ – and nipped at the side of his neck.

Curling an arm around the dip in Cas' spine, Dean pressed one last kiss. “Feeling any better about this whole 'feelings' thing yet?”

He wasn't so arrogant to think that a roll in the hay – or sand – would undo a very long lifetime of brainwashing. He wanted Cas to know this was ok, that he was ok with it and Cas could be too.

Castiel finally sat up, seemingly unperturbed by the stickiness between them, and fixed Dean with a sly look.

“So long as it is _you_ I am feeling, it does not seem so daunting.”

A laugh burst from Dean's chest and he sat up, chasing Cas' soft mouth. They cleaned up as best they could and walked back to the cabins hand in hand. When Sam whistled, Dean flipped him off, and when Hannah watched Castiel with a questioning look he bluntly told her that Dean had thought they were together like he was picking up a conversation from weeks ago. Hannah rolled her eyes and muttered something that sounded like “every time”.

“He's not sharing our nest,” she said sternly, glowering at Dean liked he'd already climbed into it.

“I don't _want_ to share your nest, ever think of that?” he quipped back.

Her expression eased.

“You know,” Dean settled down next to the fire with Cas pressing in to his side. “I think we need to make this vacation stuff a regular thing,”

Castiel’s wing settled over his shoulders. It was surprisingly light for the size of it.

“Agreed,” Sam intoned with a small smile tilting his lips. He looked fondly between his brother and Cas for a second before his gaze turned stern. “But the next place we stay will have doors on the cabins.”

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> So I had originally wrote and posted this story years and years ago. So if it seems familiar, that's why. I really loved this one and was super proud of it so I cleaned it up a bit and am posting it again! Also, if anyone is interested in beta reading for me, please let me know!
> 
> :) <3


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